The number of black males earning graduate degrees has shrunk so substantially in the past decade that a major intervention program is needed to better prepare future students, the acting president of Howard University said Tuesday.
Carlton Alexis, who became interim president of the black college in Washington this year, said educators and government officials must take immediate steps to keep the problem from worsening."It is my feeling that this problem we must deal with cries out for intervention," Alexis told a three-day Brown University conference on the future of education.
Alexis said 684 black men and 432 black women received graduate degrees in the United States in 1977. In 1982, only 483 black men received graduate degrees, compared to 564 black women. Five years later, in 1987, the number of both black men and women achieving graduate degrees had dropped significantly, to 317 men and 448 women, he said.