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Volume 6: Black American Males in Higher Education: Diminishing Proportions is a compilation of 14 chapters based on the work conducted by a distinguished group of researchers and educators from nine predominantly White universities, one historically Black university, and three community colleges as well as a major national teacher education association. In addition to providing data, both current and historical, on the participation of Black American males in higher education, the chapters present a candid assessment of some of the factors that have contributed to the proportional decline of their participation.

This article assesses the educational attainment of african american males between the 1990s and early 2000s. Beginning with a summary of a 1987–1988 study conducted by the author on african american males in the new orleans public schools, national data are provided on the high school graduation rates of african american males and females, as well as trends in their enrollment and degree completion at the undergraduate, graduate, and first-professional levels. The data show a growing educational disparity between african american women and men in all higher education institutions, but also in public and private historically black colleges and universities. The author offers recommendations to improve the performance, enrollment and graduation rates of african american males in order to close the current college gender gap.

The Computing Research Association (CRA) was formed in 1972 as the Computer Science Board (CSB), which provided a forum for the chairs of Ph.D.-granting computer science departments to discuss issues and share information (CRA, 2009). Since 1989, women have never accounted for more than 24% of the computer science faculty at any given rank (e.g., assistant, associate, or full professor). Currently, women represent 21.7%, 15.4%, and 11.7% of computer science faculty at the assistant, associate, and full professor ranks, respectively. Women have been as much as 24% of the Ph.D. graduates in computing in a single year. Since 1998, African Americans have never accounted for more than 2.0%, 1.4%, and 0.7% of the assistant, associate, and full professors, respectively, in computer science. Furthermore, African Americans have never accounted for more than 2% of the Ph.D. graduates in computer science in a single year over that same time period. It appears women and African Americans overall are underrepresented among the ranks of computer science faculty, but to what extent?

The first element contributing to the low number of African American men in college is the set of factors that cause Black men to not even consider applying or enrolling. In this volume, Launcelot Brown, Malick Koyate, and Rodney Hopson explore why so many Black men fail to grasp the opportunity to go to college while Rhonda Sharpe and William Darity examine some specific factors affecting the decision not to enroll. Also, Candace Baldwin, Jodi Fisler, and James Patton delineate issues linked to the status and perceptions of Black men in society as a whole that contribute to their absence from our campuses.

Countless pundits have referred to young African American males as an “endangered species.” While this description of the state of African American male youth between the ages of 18 and 25 years can be said to apply in many different circumstances, nowhere is it more apt than in engineering education. Their rates of matriculation, persistence, and graduation in engineering trail not only those of their white, Latino, and Asian counterparts but those of African American females as well.

The severe underrepresentation of African American males in counseling and psychology is significant, especially in light of these fields’ mandates as health professions. In this chapter, I will use a within-race intersectionality paradigm (gender, class, skin color) to inform my analysis of factors that affect the presence of African Americans males on counseling and psychology faculties. I will briefly elucidate factors that, early on, effectively “weed out” African American males from the pool of aspirants for higher education, and thence, from counseling and psychology programs and faculties. I will apply cooperative inquiry – a radical peer-to-peer research method regarded as a well-developed action research approach – to explore Black males’ experience along a range of narratives.