Desegregation of higher education has produced significant improvements in education for all Americans. 『Theopening up of segregated colleges and universities to students of all racial and ethnic backgrounds came aboutonly as the result of many forms of prolonged struggle in the courts, in the streets, and on campuses.』①     
    The efforts to open up higher educational opportunities for blacks in historically white institutions also ledto expanded opportunities for lower- and middle-class white students, especially at institutions that adopted“open admissions” policies of accepting all high school graduates. Between 1960 and 1981, while the number ofblack students between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four enrolled in college increased from 134,000 to over750,000, the number of white students in the same age group grew from just over 2 million to over 6.5 million. In 1960 more than one-half of blacks attending colleges were enrolled at historically black institutions. By1981 that percentage had declined to just 18 per cent. Most of the blacks enrolled in traditionally whiteinstitutions, however, were at two-year community colleges or at four-year public colleges that were becomingor had already become predominantly black.        
    『Desegregation of higher education produced difficult problems for historically black institutions that hadalways struggled under great hardship to provide higher education for blacks when blacks had been barred fromwhite institutions. 』②Historically black institutions, however, have continued to produce a high percentageof the most educationally and professionally successful blacks in the United States. Meanwhile, blacks inpredominantly white institutions have achieved notable progress, but they have also encountered variousproblems.    
    College completion rates for young blacks have increased substantially, but they are only about one-half therate for young whites. In 1981, for example, 11.5 percent of blacks aged twenty-five to twenty-nine and 21.3percent of whites in that age group had completed college.          
    Blacks continue to be substantially underrepresented in graduate and professional schools in the United States.During the early 1980s blacks comprised about 6 percent of students in graduate school and medical school andabout 4 percent of all law school students. Blacks also received about 4 percent of all doctoral degrees, butover half of these degrees were conferred in one discipline—education. In general, since the cry of “reversediscrimination” was raised during the middle of the 1970s, black progress in higher education has been slowedand perhaps even reversed.