NATION/WORLD
UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Thursday, February 27, 1997
7
Number of African Americans in college increases, study says
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — More African Americans are going to U.S. colleges and universities, due to sharply increased numbers of African-American women enrolled, data released yesterday shows.
Despite the increase, proportionally fewer African Americans than Caucasians attend higher education institutions. Also, many drop out in the first year, according to a study by the Frederick D. Patterson Research Institute, the research arm of the College Fund/UNCF, formerly the United Negro College Fund.
"The data shows that African-Americans have made considerable progress, but many hurdles remain," said William Gray III, the fund's president and chief executive officer.
African Americans accounted for 10 percent of undergraduates in 1994, up from 8.8 percent a decade earlier, the institute said. The college-age population is 14.3 percent African-American.
In contrast, Caucasians accounted for 73 percent of students but 68.2 percent of the college-age population.
The data book, using figures from the Education Department and other sources, found a 55 percent rise in bachelor's degrees awarded to African-American women between 1976 and 1994, compared with 20 percent increase for African-American men. Combined, degrees among African-American students increased 40 percent.
Like many African-American women in college, she is seeking a professional degree, although her choice is a rarity.
"There's a handful of Black women in engineering." she said.
Natasha Seavers, 23, a fifth-year engineering student at the University of Florida, comes close to fitting the description offered by the numbers. Her dad drives a bus, and her mother works at a dry cleaner. Seavers would be the first in her family to get a degree.
She said she has run across students who had a much bigger head start, but that she remained encouraged.
"A lot of the men in the college have an advantage because a lot of them come from second-, third- and fourth-generation college-degree
Education strides
Although the number of African Americans receiving bachelor's degrees has increased, the racial distribution on college campuses does not mirror all of America.
Laura Roddy/KANSAN
"But it's important to network and to talk to people and to do your work together so that you can try to figure out what you're doing and to stay encouraged," she said.
families, and a lot of these also own engineering companies," she said.
Partial-birth abortion rate higher than abortion-rights advocate said
The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — A prominent abortion-rights advocate acknowledged that he lied when he said that so-called partial-birth abortions were performed rarely and only to save the mother's life or to abort malformed fetuses.
Ron Fitzsimmons, executive director of the National Coalition of Abortion Providers in Alexandria, Va., a coalition of 200 independently owned clinics, admitted the lies in an article to be published Wednesday in Medical
News, an American Medical Association publication.
During a November 1995 interview on the ABC television show Nightline, Fitzsimmons insisted that the procedure was rare. Now he says abortion opponents are right, that the intact dilation and evacuation procedure, is common. Fitzsimmons could not be imme
Fitzsimmons said he had lied because he had feared the truth would damage the abortion-rights cause, but now he says the debate about the issue must be based on the truth.
Fitzsimmons could not be immediately reached at his office.
In the article, Fitzsimmons said that the patients in the majority of the cases were healthy mothers who were five-months pregnant with a healthy fetus.
"When you're a doctor who does these abortions, and the leaders of your movement appear before Congress and say these procedures are done in only the most tragic of circumstances ... it makes you feel like a dirty little abortionist with a dirty little secret," said Fitzsimmons in the article.
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