Washington
Historically black colleges are a vital part of the nation's higher-education landscape, but they need to change how they are perceived to highlight the positive work they are doing, said John S. Wilson Jr., executive director of the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
That means the colleges must not be seen only as "plaintiffs" in the struggle for civil rights but also as "partners" in reaching President Barack Obama's goal of having the highest proportion of students graduating from college in the world by 2020, Mr. Wilson said. He added that his office is working to collect better data on the successes and challenges of student retention and graduation at historically black colleges.
Mr. Wilson spoke on a panel Thursday focused on what people across higher education can learn from the experiences and efforts to improve student achievement at minority-serving institutions. The event was hosted by Education Sector, a nonprofit group based in Washington.
The Obama administration has shown its commitment to minority-serving institutions, supporting the inclusion of $2.5-billion for those colleges in the student-loan legislation the president signed last month, Mr. Wilson said.
"Many minority-serving institutions are doing great but unheralded work and are worthy of more investment," he said after the meeting.
Valerie P. Wilson, associate provost and director of institutional diversity at Brown University, joined other speakers at Thursday's event in emphasizing that even top research universities with much smaller proportions of minority students have much to learn by forming partnerships with minority-serving colleges. Brown, in fact, has a nearly 50-year partnership with Tougaloo College, a private, four-year historically black institution in Jackson, Miss.
The partnership provides faculty and student exchanges and collaborative research projects, and administrators from the institutions meet regularly to plan projects that benefit both. For example, Brown and Tougaloo students from a wide variety of majors have been able to gain valuable insight studying at Tougaloo's archive of civil-rights materials. Another program gives Brown graduate students an opportunity to teach in their field at Tougaloo for one or two semesters, providing them the experience of working in a different cultural and academic setting and making them better prepared for the job market, Ms. Wilson said.
Demographic Shifts
Minority-serving colleges represent what the future demographic of the nation's students and work force will look like, said Deborah A. Santiago, vice president for policy and research at Excelencia in Education, a nonprofit organization that promotes education policies to improve the academic success of Latino students. So minority-serving institutions' practices and experiences will be important to all of higher education as the number of minority students continues to increase and the student bodies of all kinds of colleges diversify.
Institutions that serve mostly minority students are better at understanding the challenges of those groups and can tailor programs to fulfill those needs, she said, such as mentoring and advising programs that work with individuals or small groups to keep students on track.
Charles N. Smith, vice president for student affairs at South Carolina State University, said that if all institutions don't do a better job of keeping minority students in college to graduate, they could end up unemployed or in the welfare system.
His institution is one of many in the state seeking to encourage more black males to stay in college and become teachers, a profession that has far fewer men than women.
Even with the programs that are in place, minority-serving institutions face numerous challenges to helping their students succeed, speakers said. One major problem is that a large share of minority college students come from low-income households and are the first in their family to attend college. But minority-serving colleges tend to be less-wealthy institutions without large endowments to spend on financial aid, and their dropout rates are higher than at other institutions.
The increase in the Pell Grant, approved as part of the new student-loan law, will help keep more of those students in college, Mr. Wilson said.
Another challenge is that there needs to be more research-based evidence on which programs work and which don't, the panelists said.
"Insufficient data has been the bane of my existence," Mr. Wilson said, adding that it is a problem his office is "aggressively trying to fix."
Comments
1. timlincoln - April 23, 2010 at 09:16 am
It continues to intrigue me that discussions about improving the quality of higher education (however we may construe quality) in the United States often include statements about how little data there is upon which to make policy.
2. cmcswain - April 23, 2010 at 10:02 am
I don't know if this is a reflection of the tone that Mr. Wilson is taking or the story angle of this article, but the idea that HBCUs see themselves as "...only 'plaintiffs' in the struggle for civil rights," rather than "...as 'partners' in reaching President Barack Obama's goal of having the highest proportion of students graduating from college in the world by 2020..." is deeply flawed.
I graduated from NC A&T State University, a school that has a deep history in the civil rights struggle. Indeed, we are home to the Greensboro Four - four students who sparked the student sit-in movement for integration.
NC A&T has a proud history in the civil rights struggle and our mission is steeped in a tradition of preparing African American students for excellence. This is our foundation. But teachers and students at NC A&T - and I'd argue most HBCUs - aren't stuck in the past. Far from it. If there is any sector in higher education that has had to continuously ensure that their existence was timely and relevant, it has been HBCUs because there is always someone who is trying to "prove" why they aren't needed anymore.
As an example of how these schools have to reinvent and reinvigorate themselves, NC A&T has been long known for its high rate of graduating African American engineers. But we are investing in new programs and institutions like graduate programs in journalism, leadership studies, and even nanotechnology. I don't even know what nanotechnology is, but some student in a lab at NC A&T does. And that's the point. We are, in fact, looking to the 21st century.
But when article after article, or statement after statement, claims that we don't, it continues to perpetuate the myth that we are unnecessary relics of the past. I would challenge Mr. Wilson to do a little more research and find out what is actually happening on the ground at our HBCUs, rather than relying on conventional wisdom.
--Courtney McSwain, Proud Aggie, c/o 2004
3. onthelist - April 23, 2010 at 12:20 pm
As a graduate of Winston-Salem State University, right down the road from NC A&T State University, I also agree that when our HBCUS are written off as relics on the verge of extinction, rather than progressive, innovative leaders in many fields of study, we are missing the point when the conversation for improvement begins.
What HBCUS need are infusions of cash, academically-prepared students, and leaders who understand the past well-enough to prepare for the future. The easiest way to solve HBCU retention and graduation issues is to reform the K-12 system quickly enough to send well-prepared minority students off to college.
I made it to college severely deficient in math but my other skills and abilities are very strong so I didn't get lost in the system. We have students who are deficient in every subject and get carted off to HBCUs and we expect the HBCUs to perform miracles and graduate them in four years with little money to commit to academic support.
Reform K-12 and 90% of the problems at HBCUs will go away.
-Harold T. Respass, WSSU c/o 2009
4. ellis - April 26, 2010 at 10:05 am
Here, here, Harold! I am in complete agreement with you. I worked in a HBCU when I fist got started in higher education and learned a bundle about mission and caring and family, all while being a white female in a black male world. HBCUs definitely have a substantial and pivotal role to play in higher education, and it would be shortsighted of anyone to think otherwise. Kudos to them all for the long slogs uphill they go through over and over, while turning out the prepared graduates this country needs.
5. oneopinion - April 26, 2010 at 01:22 pm
Mr. Wilson's statements are problematic because he has concluded that all African-American college students are in need of some type of remediation or a hand-up. The best and brightest African-American students are more likely to attend and graduate from predominately white universities. I encourage Wilson to examine the admissions and grading policies of many HBCUs. He will discover that most of these colleges are willing to admit anyone with a pulse. Most of them have not established any type of services to assist unprepared students. The administrators of these colleges are more interested in the number of students admitted rather than the quality of students admitted. Some HBCUs have devised policies that require unprepared students to attend a community college for at least one year while maintaining them as matriculating students. Furthermore, many HBCUs lower academic standards just as many troubled high schools. Most HBCUs allow students to repeat failed courses without the failing grade affecting their grade point averages. Some HBCUs admit students with 1.5 high school grade point averages and consider them in good standing with a 1.5 semester and overall grade point average. Some HBCU administrators and professors carry on like unqualified high school teachers many of us have viewed on YouTube or on programs like 60 Minutes. It is time for HBCUs to stop admitting anyone who may be classified as a Homo Sapien and become selective in their admissions process. For this reason, African-American students who are successfully admitted to white colleges are quite different from the majority of students accepted by HBCUs and should not be stigmatized by Mr. Wilson or anyone else because of the problems experienced by their HBCUs counterparts.
6. eliffmavi - May 03, 2010 at 06:50 am
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