II. HBCUs and Selected Majority Colleges & Universities

A. PageRanks of HBCUs

The PageRanks for the Home Pages of all of the 104 officially designated HBCUs are presented in Table A1. This table will be displayed by clicking the following link:

Table A1. PageRanks of HBCUs

This data was collected on October 6th, 7th, and 8th (2006) from workstations in the DLL's offices in Silver Spring, Maryland. When examining this data, the reader should keep in mind that PageRanks may change over time because of the addition or loss of links from other Websites. A page that is ranked 8 one week may be ranked 7 the next. However, the fact that PageRanks represent Google's distillation of the "votes" a page receives from all of the other Websites in the world makes it unlikely that a page would rise two or more ranks within a few weeks or fall by two or more ranks. In other words, the changes are more likely to be minor fluctuations rather than sharp surges or deep plummets -- unless the world learns that something "very good" or "very bad" has happened to the organization that owns the Website. This expectation is confirmed by the rightmost column in Table A1 that shows the changes in PageRanks for the 104 HBCUs between March 2006 and October 2006. As the reader will see, most PageRanks did not change during this period, and most of the changes that did occur were small ones.

The detailed results shown in Table A1 are distilled into the smaller Table A2 (below) that contains the average PageRanks received by all HBCUs, the average PageRanks received by different types of HBCUs, and the changes in average PageRanks between March 2006 and October 2006.

Table A2. Average PageRanks for Types of HBCUs

Comments:

• Tables A1 and A2 indicate that HBCUs earned modest increases in PageRanks between March and October 2006. The overall average for all HBCUs increased from 5.8 to 6.6, and the average for each type of HBCU also increased.
  
  
• Although no HBCU received a PageRank equal 9 or 10 during either observation, the number receiving PageRank = 8 increased from three in March to five in October (FAMU, Hampton, Howard, Jackson, and Xavier.)
  
  
• On the other hand, one HBCU (Arkansas Baptist) received a temporarily lower PageRank in October than in March because it changed its domain name sometime during the March/October time frame. Undoubtedly its PageRank will increase as more Websites ccorrect their old links to reference the new domain name.

While Tables A1 and A2 enable us to compare the PageRanks of HBCUs with each other and to measure their progress in increasing the value of their PageRanks over time, they provide no clue as to whether these ratings are higher or lower than we should expect. Perspective is gained by considering the PageRanks for some well-known majority colleges and universities displayed in Table B (below).

Table B. PageRanks of Selected Majority Colleges & Universities

Note: The numbers in parentheses in the right hand column indicate the increase or decrease in an institution's PageRanks between March 06 and October 06.

Comments:

• Although the DLL was unable to identify any university that received PageRank = 10 during its March observations, Table B shows that the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Texas at Austin had moved up to that level by October.
  
  
  
• More significantly, four of the seven for-profit institutions listed in Table B in March (DeVry, ITT, Phoenix, and Walden) had moved up from PageRank = 6 to PageRank = 7 by October.