OPINION: What Black students actually need to succeed in college

Every year starting around February, you can feel an extra buzz in high schools across the country. School hallways are filled with the sights and sounds of celebration as students start receiving and accepting college offers.

As a principal, I cheer for those moments every year and feel genuine pride in what they represent. Our students work hard, and they deserve every celebration.

But after seven years at North Lawndale College Prep, including these last four years as the school’s principal,  I know there is an even harder question on the horizon once the confetti settles: What happens to these students after they set foot on campus?

The time is now for an honest, ongoing conversation about the gap between getting Black students into college — including HBCUs — and helping make sure they earn their degree. These two goals are connected to one another, but our school and communities have not yet fully reckoned with how they are different.

The celebration trap

The work that we’re doing to get students from North Lawndale into college is real, and it matters. When a first-generation student from our community earns an acceptance letter to the school of their dreams, that is a true triumph

But here is an uncomfortable truth: our education system has trained itself to measure success at the point of admission. College acceptance rates are a headline metric: they appear in district reports, press releases, and school rankings. Persistence and completion data rarely get the same spotlight, and that silence is costing us.

Consider the numbers. Overall, 61.1 percent of students who began their postsecondary education in fall 2019 graduated within six years. For Black students, that figure drops to just 44.0 percent — the lowest completion rate among all major racial groups. By comparison, the six-year graduation rate was 75.7 percent for Asian students and 69.0 percent for white students. Hispanic students completed at 50.5 percent. Black students are not just lagging behind, they are being left behind at a rate those enrollment headlines would never reveal.

If we are celebrating acceptance letters while ignoring completion data, we are celebrating the starting line and calling it the finish line. That is not good enough for our students.

What actually keeps students there

The students who don’t make it are rarely the ones who can’t make the cut academically. Instead, they are often the ones who never find their footing because they felt invisible, unseen, or simply alone once they arrive on campus. Research consistently shows that a sense of belonging is a stronger predictor of student retention than even academic performance. And yet belonging is the thing we invest in least.

Roughly one in four college students doesn’t make it to their third semester. For Black students at public four-year institutions, the pandemic made a painful reality even worse: persistence rates dropped from 82 percent for the 2018 entering cohort to 76.2 percent for those who began in 2021. When the structures that hold students together were stripped away due to COVID, Black students felt it most acutely.

I know this not just from data, but from lived experience. I am an HBCU alum, and the structures that helped me persist through college were mostly communal. I was able to receive some excellent near-peer guidance and alumni mentorship during my time on campus, which was great for practical advice but even better because it was proof that people who looked like me had walked this path and made it through to the other side.

The starting line, not the finish line

In my school, we have created a culture that treats getting into college as just the beginning. That means having honest conversations with our students about what campus life will actually feel like. It also means connecting them to mentors and valuable resources before they leave, not after they’re already struggling.

With the Phoenix Pact, we reduce the financial burden for students attending our partner institutions by providing scholarships and helping them with the basic necessities. We also connect them with other NLCP alumni, along with individualized counseling services to ensure they stay on track to graduate.

But we cannot do this alone. Schools, districts, colleges, and entire communities need to invest in a year-round infrastructure of belonging, instead of kicking into high gear in the spring.

Black students are not failing college. In too many cases, college is failing them. We have to ensure we do what we can to stop them from quietly disappearing from campuses that never made room for them to stay.

Acceptance into college was never the finish line. It’s time we started acting like it.