What you see is not always what you get.

While a recent survey listed the District of Columbia as the top city for black people to live, black enrollment at Georgetown and several of its local peers remains below the national level, and some students say that campus culture could be more inclusive of minorities.

Black Enterprise Magazine’s annual list of the “Best Cities for African Americans,” which is published in this month’s issue, analyzed the financial and academic success of black residents in cities around the country and found that D.C. was the most “livable” metropolitan area for blacks and offers a particularly ideal environment for black college students.

Rankings were based on the proportion of business ownership, median household income, percentage of households who earn more than $100,000 a year, unemployment rate, home loan rejection rate, homeownership rate and college graduation rate among black residents in each of the cities it evaluated. Some of the areas in the evaluation of D.C. included the wealthy suburbs of Montgomery County and Prince George’s County, Md., the latter of which is the most affluent black majority county in the U.S.

The District’s “livability” makes its universities some of black students’ best options, according to Black Enterprise.

Howard University, the University of Maryland and Georgetown made Black Enterprise’s list of the Top 50 Colleges For African Americans in 2004 of the 50 top colleges for African Americans. Georgetown ranked eleventh on the list, while Howard ranked fourth and Maryland came in 21st.

Georgetown’s undergraduate body is 8 percent black, well below the 13 percent collegiate national average..

Still, black students are generally less represented at some of Georgetown’s neighboring institutions – black enrollment is 4 percent at Catholic University, 5 percent at American University and 6 percent at The George Washington University. Conversely, historically-black Howard University is 92 percent black, while Trinity University is 55 percent black.

Admissions officers at Georgetown attribute this low enrollment to competition among top universities for the same limited pool of highly qualified minority applicants.

“Those students, when admitted, will have more options, and it’s much more difficult to compete against our peers who have even higher-name profiles,” said Jaime Briseno, senior associate director of undergraduate admissions.

“As students’ achievements, both academic, and . out of the classroom, as they become more prominent and more competitive, there are fewer and fewer students,” Briseno said.

Harrison Beacher (COL ’08), an outgoing board member of Georgetown’s Black Student Alliance, said that D.C.’s diverse black community provides a unique cultural experience for black college students, and in turn, makes the District an ideal city for them.

“You can see firsthand what’s going on in Southeast,” he said. “If you so choose, you can devote a lot of your time, and even your life, to helping out.”

Some black students said they were troubled by the support available to the black community on the Hilltop.

“We really don’t have the resources that other student groups have,” said Melanie George (MSB ’08), BSA’s president and a senior business assistant at THE HOYA. “You really feel strongly that as a minority student, there is no one advocating for you.”

George added that informal social race segregation that exists at Georgetown contradicts the standard one might imagine after reading the “Best Cities” feature.

“I really think that we have a long way to go here at Georgetown,” she said. “All the segregation . it makes it that much more difficult to be a student here, to feel comfortable, to fit in.”