Having their lives narrowed down? The state of Black women’s college success

Winkle-Wagner, R. (2015). Having their lives narrowed down? The state of Black women’s college success. Review of Educational Research, 85(2), 171-204.


This article sharpened my awareness of a serious problem in higher education. Though reportedly the number of Black women enrolling in colleges and universities has doubled over the last half century, graduation rates are still not high for these women, with only about one in five Black women over age 25 holding a baccalaureate degree (p. 172). This means that higher education institutions are taking in these women, and taking their tuition and fee dollars, but a large number of Black women are not completing the degrees they are there to get.

As a university faculty member, I am concerned about the small numbers of Black students, male or female, in our teacher education program. In nearly 30 years at my university, this inequity in numbers has always been a problem, but over the last decade, I have seen what looks like a decrease rather than an increase. The decrease is primarily in the numbers of Black women I have seen in my classes; there has never been more than a handful of men, Black or others (my area is elementary education, so that may have something to do with that).

This article seems to say we are doing better at getting Black women to the university, but we need to do better at keeping them there, and at assisting them in completing their career and life goals. I am in complete agreement with that idea, but where do I start? How do I learn more about Black women in college and what can be done to make sure they are successful there?

The remainder of Winkle-Wagner’s article does not provide answers to those questions. Winkle-Wagner summarizes the results of 119 studies, and discusses why we still don’t really know enough about the problem. She goes into detail about many of the problems and limitations of the research we now have on Black women’s experiences in higher education; I will not try to summarize those here in order to focus on what I believe is the most serious finding (see discussion below), but I recommend reading about and perhaps accessing some of the studies Winkle-Wagner included here. I must add that I was impressed by the range and the inclusiveness of Winkle-Wagner’s review, and by her recognition of the value of both quantitative and qualitative research when we are looking at complex problems like the one that is the focus of this article.

For me, the most striking finding concerned the kinds of factors that were the focus of the reviewed studies—or rather, what kinds of factors were least studied. Winkle-Wagner’s 119 studies fell into three categories: 1) those that examined individual factors (56 studies), 2) those that examined relationship factors (38 studies), and 3) those that examined institutional factors (25 studies). It is important that the third category has received the least attention. It is one thing to look at variables in individuals and their relationships, but another thing to look at, and perhaps challenge, the normative conditions found in universities—conditions that have accrued over years of tradition and have been accepted as just “the way things are” in colleges and universities. After reading this article, I am convinced that we need to look deeper at those institutional factors, and we need to make changes if we are going to meet the needs of the changing group of students in universities.

That needs to start with research that takes a hard, honest look at what we are doing now to make universities successful places for all students (not just Black women, though we certainly need to do better with them). This discussion will be difficult, because discussions involving race and gender are always difficult, but we need to have those discussions nonetheless. We need to look at what is not working, and why, and some solutions need to be proposed and tested. Winkle-Wagner’s study is, I hope, a challenge that researchers will take up, and soon. If universities do not deal with this problem, they may soon feel it in their bottom lines in losses of tuition and in potential alumni support. Then this problem will take on the urgency that it needs to have now but does not. I am one of those who would welcome some ideas on how to support a diverse student population so that they can stay in college, and in my case, become the teachers who are so desperately needed in today’s increasingly diverse classrooms.