City University of New York officials say they are determined to increase enrollment of black males by 25% over the next three years, shining attention on the plight of one of higher education’s most marginalized groups.

CUNY officials on Friday made public the final report of its “black male initiative” task force that Chancellor Matthew Goldstein created last year to grapple with a problem plaguing CUNY and schools across America – startling low rates of recruitment, retention, and graduation of black men.

While colleges are constantly searching for ways to attract and retain more black male students, Mr. Goldstein is looking for CUNY to take a prominent role in the national arena in solving the problem.

The report recommends that CUNY’s 19 colleges conduct a systematic review of the achievement of black male students and that the university spend money on a “post-incarceration” program for adolescents and young adults that would help released prisoners learn about CUNY. It also calls for the recruitment of black males into the university’s Teacher Academy, a special teacher education program for talented undergraduate students that is modeled on CUNY’s Honors College. The task force also recommended the establishment of an institute to carry out its proposals.

“Every campus will recognize the urgency of the problem with black men in New York City and look within itself and ask how it can make a difference,” CUNY’s vice chancellor for academic affairs, Selma Botman, told The New York Sun yesterday in a telephone interview. “What CUNY is doing differently is putting the spotlight on itself. “Written by a task force group composed of CUNY college presidents, university officials, and scholars, the report said educational opportunities for black men are hampered by the population’s high incarceration and arrest rates, low levels of employment, and racial discrimination.

While black men come to CUNY only slightly less prepared than other population groups, the report states, they drop out at alarmingly high rates. Only 74.3% of black men enrolled in CUNY baccalaureate programs return for a second year of study, while 27.1% of black men who enrolled in the fall of 1998 graduated within six years. Black males constitute about 10% of CUNY’s undergraduate student population of 190,465, about half the number of black women.

“It is clear that the public education system of this city has failed many black male youths,” the report said.

This summer, the City Council approved $2 million in funding for the initiative, university officials said. The money in part will pay for full-time staffers on CUNY campuses whose job it will be to recruit more black men from selected areas in the city. It will also pay for a post-incarceration program being developed by John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan.

The president of Medgar Evers College, Edison Jackson, called Mr. Goldstein’s efforts a “bold move on the part of the university system.” His college in 2003 started what it called a “male development and empowerment center,” which offers to help the school retain black male students, who made up a small fraction of the student body. Mr. Jackson said black male enrollment increased by 22% a year after the program started. One prominent black conservative, John McWhorter, a Manhattan Institute senior fellow in public policy, criticized the task force report for its recommendation that CUNY needs to recruit more black men in professional positions who would serve as role models.

“I hope we won’t go back to the 1968 idea that the way to help young black men is to lower standards for them and to treat them like the only people in the world who can only perform for teachers who look like them,” he said.