Jayne Matthews, Baltimore Times
- Dr. Burnett’s words have proven to true for thousands of college graduates. For a small, but growing group of Africans Americans it was also the passport to the prestige of earning a doctoral degree and the economic power to enter the upper middle class.
However, after almost two decades of uninterrupted progress, the number of blacks receiving doctoral degrees has declined by 10 percent for two consecutive years. According to a report recently published in the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, blacks earned 7.1 percent of all doctorates awarded in the United States in 2004 and 6.2 percent in 2006. Here is an excerpt from the article titled “Once Again, a Decline in Doctoral Degree Awards to African Americans.”
