She then applied to the University of Michigan graduate program in mathematics. Michigan accepted African Americans, which many US educational institutions did not at the time. After working full-time at the historically black Wiley College in Marshall, Texas, and attending Michigan only during the summer, Browne's work paid off and she received a teaching fellowship at Michigan, attending full-time and completing her dissertation in 1949. Her dissertation, "Studies of One Parameter Subgroups of Certain Topological and Matrix Groups," was supervised by George Yuri Rainich. She was one of the first African-American women in the US to earn a doctorate in mathematics, along with Evelyn Boyd Granville, who also earned a Ph.D. in 1949. Euphemia Haynes was the very first African-American woman in the US to earn a doctorate in mathematics, having earned hers in 1943.