The nation’s higher education system is exacerbating the disadvantages minorities face instead of alleviating them, a recent study by the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce found.

The July report, titled “Separate and Unequal: How Higher Education Reinforces the Intergenerational Reproduction of White Racial Privilege,” analyzed the correlation between the race of a student and his or her choices regarding higher education. The researchers found that white students tend to attend selective universities with high graduation rates, while minorities tend to attend open-access colleges, community colleges and other institutions with low graduation rates.

According to CEW Director of Research Jeff Strohl, a co-author of the report, this goes against the typical portrayal of college as “merit-based” and a method of leveling the playing field.

“We were greatly surprised at how significantly different the enrollment flows are between whites and minorities,” Strohl said.

Strohl reported that 82 percent of white enrollment is in the top 468 schools, while African-American and Hispanic students make up 92 percent of enrollment in lower-tier schools.

“There has been a great shift in white enrollment out of the bottom tiers of the education system up to the top, while 72 percent of African-American and 68 percent of net new Hispanic enrollment has gone to the bottom,” Strohl said.

Resident Director of the Black House Aya Waller-Bey (COL ’14) attributed this to a lack of access.

“College-bound students from high-need communities often lack the exposure to institutions like Georgetown, as many of their peers choose not to attend college or attend public, in-state institutions — or their schools may not encourage their students to apply to selective colleges and universities,” Waller-Bey said.

As a result, Dean of Admissions Charles Deacon said that Georgetown has partnered with Knowledge Is Power Program charter schools nationwide and Cristo Rey Jesuit high schools to reach potential applicants who would otherwise view Georgetown as inaccessible. The Georgetown Scholarship Program, which supports approximately 10 percent of the student body, also helps students from underperforming schools navigate the academic environment of Georgetown to promote a higher graduation rate.

“Kids from these schools would graduate nationally at 32 percent, but at Georgetown, they graduate at 95 percent,” Deacon said.

Overall, however, Deacon said that Georgetown tended to fit in with the report’s findings.

“Low-income students, particularly minority students, don’t have access to places like Georgetown,” Deacon said. “For a place like Georgetown, there’s only so much you can do since we are an academic institution, and we need a pool of talented students. The process is watching out through all of the eyes of the people who read applications for interesting, talented people — recognizing that the current odds are tilted against some people.”

The New York Times conducted a study in May that addressed the relationship between black freshman matriculation and overall graduation rates in specific universities. In the study, Georgetown had a 93.8 percent graduation rate and 8.2 percent of the class was African-American. In comparison, Columbia University had a 92.8 percent graduation rate with 10.5 percent of the class African-American. Duke University had a 94.4 percent graduation rate with 11.8 percent black students.

Nevertheless, Deacon said that Georgetown is diverse.

“There are a lot of pretty well-known schools with pretty low percentages of African American and Latino students,” Deacon said. “Georgetown is actually doing well, relatively speaking. We still could do even better, is the point.”

Strohl agreed and pointed to admissions results from the top selective schools in the country, although he would not comment specifically on Georgetown’s results.

“What we have seen is that the most selective schools haven’t cast their net wide enough and are missing a significant number of high-performing, low-income, minority students,” Strohl said.

Waller-Bey agreed and said that she felt Georgetown could do more to reach out to underrepresented communities.

“I think Georgetown could work more diligently to increase its presence in underrepresented communities in urban cities, which as a result could increase the amount of minority students who apply and gain admissions to Georgetown,” Waller-Bey said.

But the issue of reaching out to underrepresented communities has become more complicated in recent years as class is often seen as a better judge of privilege than race.

“In today’s world, there are many students of multiple races, and as time is going on, the blending and blurring of race is becoming more of a complicating factor, which is why we look at class more than race,” Deacon said. “If we are successful at looking at class, we’re going to include everyone because first-generation, working-class, white kids can get passed up by affirmative action programs based only on race.”