Retaining African Americans in Higher Education: Challenging Paradigms for Retaining Students, Faculty, and Administrators (review)

Retaining African Americans in Higher Education: Challenging Paradigms for Retaining Students, Faculty, and Administrators, edited by Lee Jones. Sterling, VA: Stylus, 2001. 288 pp. $59.95 ($24.95)

Retaining African Americans in Higher Education is a timely and novel approach to a critical topic. Edited by Lee Jones, associate dean for academic affairs and instruction in the College of Education and associate professor in Educational Leadership at Florida State University, the volume contains 14 chapters, a preface, a conclusion, and two personal reflections that describe issues related to the retention of African American students, administrators, and faculty at predominantly white colleges and universities. "Written about African Americans, by African Americans" (p. xii), this book is recommended by a white woman for higher education administrators, faculty, researchers, and policymakers of all racial and ethnic groups.

The perspectives included in this volume offer insights that may be particularly helpful for guiding practice and research in this post-affirmative action era. The recent legal and political attacks on affirmative action in college admissions, most notably Proposition 209 in California and Hopwood vs. Texas (1996), provide one stimulus for rethinking traditional approaches to the retention of African Americans. Although discussions of the legal issues pertaining to affirmative action are quickly dated, given continuing developments in this area, Eugene L. Anderson, doctoral candidate in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Virginia, provides a succinct review of the legal history through July 2000.

Original thinking on this topic is also needed because, despite numerous suggestions for closing the gap, retention in higher education continues to be lower for African Americans than for whites. Those who care about the retention of African Americans in higher education need to carefully consider the most appropriate ways to communicate this persisting problem. One of the primary weaknesses of this volume is that the continued underrepresentation of African Americans among students, administrators, and faculty is not well documented. Although Anderson and other authors, including Jason DeSousa, vice president for student affairs at Savannah State University, provide useful contextual descriptions of the legal and political issues limiting the retention of African Americans, and others (e.g., Branch; DeSousa) mention the educational benefits of diversity, the volume lacks a clear description of the extent to which the retention of African Americans in higher education is a problem that warrants the allocation of scarce time, money, and other resources. Some of the authors do provide some data on the representation of African Americans among students, administrators, and faculty, but the presentation is often limited in several ways. Specifically, some of the data are dated, while other data are difficult to interpret, given the absence of a reference point (e.g., the representation of African Americans in the population). Although trend analyses can be a useful tool, many of the trends included in this book are limited by focusing on changes over only a one- or two-year period, describing changes for all minorities aggregated together, or failing to acknowledge possible reasons underlying the observed differences across groups (e.g., differential rates of growth in the population of different racial and ethnic groups). Among the best sources of data, some of which are cited but not fully utilized by authors in the volume, are the American Council on Education's Annual Status Report on the Status of Minorities in Higher Education (Wilds, 2000), the Frederick D. Patterson's African American Education Data Book (Nettles & Perna, 1997), and the National Center for Educational Statistics (2001) Digest of Education Statistics.

Despite this limitation, the book makes several important contributions to our understanding of the issues related to the retention of African Americans in higher education. Although the title implies a narrow focus on "retention," most of the 16 authors appropriately recognize that retention is a process that involves transitions between different positions and statuses. Noting...