New Data on Graduation Rates at Black Colleges:

[Bro. Askia]

New Data on Graduation Rates at Black Colleges: A Dismal Performance Overall, But Two HBCUs Beat Harvard
http://www.jbhe.com/news_views/43_grad-rates_HBCUs.html

Here is our inaugural report on graduation rates at virtually all of the nation's four-year black colleges. At Texas College and Barber-Scotia College the graduation rate of black students is higher than the rate of black students who attend Harvard and Princeton. But at a majority of the black colleges less than one third of all entering students go on to graduate.

Nationwide about 39 percent of all African Americans who enter a four-year college go on to earn a diploma at the same institution within six years. If we include black students who transfer to other colleges or take more than six years to complete their degree program, the overall graduation rate for black students is still under 50 percent.

It turns out that at a majority of the nation's historically black colleges and universities, the black student graduation rate is lower than the national average. In many cases much lower.

In March of this year, for the first time, the Department of Education published on its Web site the student graduation rates for thousands of educational institutions in the United States. Previously, the only graduation rate data readily available was for institutions that are members of the National Collegiate Athletic Association.

Now the new Department of Education database enables us to report the graduation rates for students at the nation's historically black colleges and universities that are not members of the NCAA. We now have black student graduation rate data for 76 four-year HBCUs. Of these four-year HBCUs in the United States, 28 colleges and universities have a higher black student graduation rate than the national average for blacks, which stands at 39 percent. Four of the HBCUs are right at the national average and 44 have a rate lower than the national average. In fact, at nearly one half of the black colleges in our survey two thirds or more of all entering students do not go on to earn a diploma within a six-year period.

There were some pleasant surprises in the new Department of Education data. Texas College in Tyler, Texas, has a total enrollment of 617 students, 96 percent of whom are African Americans. Only 2 percent are white. Yet, according to the new Department of Education database, Texas College announces a black student graduation rate of 100 percent. The Education Department figures are for the approximately 100 students who entered Texas College in 1996 and earned their diploma by June 2002. This perfect black student graduation rate may be a statistical fluke because the data covers only one year. Nevertheless, the fact that all entering students at Texas College in any year went on to earn their degrees is a remarkable achievement. In June 2003, 98 students earned bachelor's degrees at the predominantly black college.

Barber-Scotia College in Concord, North Carolina, is not far behind the performance of Texas College. The college has 616 students enrolled, 97 percent of whom are black. For the class that entered in 1996, 97.5 percent of the black students went on to earn their degree within six years. In June 2003 the college awarded 108 bachelor's degrees. Again this data covers only one year. It remains to be seen if these two colleges can match this performance year after year. But the current year's performance is better than that achieved by black students at Harvard and Princeton.

Bennett College, the HBCU for black women in Greensboro, North Carolina, now headed by Johnnetta Cole, provides a striking example of the differences that can occur in graduation rate data for a one-year versus a four-year average. Bennett College reports a one-year graduation rate for black students entering in 1996 of 80 percent. Of the 108 students who matriculated in 1996, 86 earned their diplomas. This is a major achievement. But if we look at four-year figures for students who entered in the 1993 to 1996 period we find that only 44 percent of the 659 entering students earned their degrees. It remains to be seen if Bennett can repeat over the long term its remarkable performance in the latest year.

Among the historically black colleges and universities for which we have four-year averages of the black student graduation rate performance, prestigious Spelman College in the city of Atlanta has the highest rate. In fact, the Spelman black student graduation rate of 76 percent is higher than the black student graduation rate at 16 of the nation's 54 high-ranking predominantly white colleges and universities. Spelman's unusual strength shows in the fact that it has a higher black student graduation rate than such prestigious and primarily white colleges as Bates, Hamilton, Grinnell, and Bryn Mawr, as well as that great academic powerhouse, the University of Chicago.

Overall, we found 11 black colleges and universities with a black student graduation rate of more than 50 percent. Therefore, 65 of the HBCUs in our survey do not graduate even one half of the students who enroll at their institutions. At nine black colleges fewer than one in five entering students go on to earn a diploma. At the large Texas Southern University in Houston, only 12 percent of entering students go on to graduate. At the University of the District of Columbia, only one of every 20 students who enrolls earns a diploma.

Explaining the Low Graduation Rates at HBCUs

The low graduation rates at black colleges are due to a number of reasons. Huge numbers of the students enrolled at these institutions are from low-income families. Many of these students are underprepared for college because they come from homes where there are few books. In most cases, neither parent nor grandparent went to college. Often the African-American students who enroll at these black colleges attended poor quality, inner-city or rural, predominantly black high schools.

A majority of the black students from low-income families have difficulty meeting the costs of a college education and many have to drop out of college for economic reasons. Adding to the problem is the fact that the black colleges on the whole have very small and totally inadequate endowments. They often lack the resources necessary to generate funds for student financial aid. When financial aid is offered, freshmen and sophomores get the bulk of the funds. Often the black colleges are unable to furnish sufficient aid packages for upperclassmen to permit them to stay in school. This circumstance appears to be a major factor in accounting for the low black student graduation rate at these schools.

Graduation Rates of Black Students at HBCUs
http://www.jbhe.com/images/issue43/grad-rate_HBCUs.gif

 

[Bro. Askia]

Higher learning
http://www.dailylocal.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=11757559&BRD=1671&PAG=461&dept_id=17782&rfi=6

By PAMELA BATZEL , Staff Writer 05/20/2004

Last in a series: Brown vs. Board, 50 years later.

Terica Troutman wanted to attend a college near her home in New Jersey, but when it came time to choose she rejected the one closest to her family. The school was largely white, and black friends who attended the university told Troutman that they had never felt a part of the campus.

So Troutman chose Lincoln University, which, like its neighbor Cheyney University, is among the 100-plus historically black colleges and universities in the country.

As Troutman prepared for her graduation ceremony a few weeks ago, she said she had wanted a campus where she would feel included by students and supported by her instructors.

"There’s a better sense of family here, and you learn better when you’re being nurtured at the same time," said Troutman, who is headed to Rutgers University for graduate work in anthropology and gender studies.

Fifty years after the U.S. Supreme court’s landmark Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, Kan., ruling -- which ended the doctrine of "separate but equal" and ordered the desegregation of public schools in the nation -- students, faculty and administrators at Lincoln and Cheyney University say that despite their "separate" nature, historically black colleges and universities are still vital to the education of black students.

In fact, the HBCUs -- as the historically black colleges and universities are more frequently called -- award baccalaureate degrees to more than their share of black students, according to the United Negro College Fund.

The fund said the nation’s 105 HBCUs represent 3 percent of the institutions of higher education in the United States but almost a quarter of black undergraduates graduate. And more than half of all black professionals in the United States are graduates of HBCUs -- schools officially defined as such by Congress in 1965 -- according to the fund.

Ivory Nelson, president of Lincoln, the alma mater of Thurgood Marshall, lead attorney for the NAACP in the Brown case, said in the last five years, 26 percent of Lincoln’s graduates have majored in the sciences. "Where else are you going to find that many black kids graduating in the sciences?" asked Nelson, a chemist.

"The HBCUs are more efficient in producing a black middle class," said Neal Holmes, associate professor of political science at Cheyney who teaches courses on black history.

A report in the spring 2004 edition of the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education paints a less positive picture of HBCUs. It says that at a majority of the HBCUs, the graduation rate for black students is lower than the national graduation rate for black students, which is 39 percent.

But according to Rich Henson, former vice president for institutional advancement at Cheyney, many HBCUs often take on students with more significant challenges than majority white schools as part of their mission -- a characteristic the journal acknowledges.

Many of the students at the HBCUs come from low-income families and attended "poor quality, inner-city or rural, predominantly black high schools," the journal reported. Henson, a Cheyney alumnus, said the HBCUs want to give those students the opportunity to get a higher education but that when remedial help is not enough the students must leave, which affects the graduation rate.

At Cheyney, the rate is 30 percent, according to the journal, which also reported some students also drop out because they cannot afford the tuition. HBCUs typically have small and inadequate endowments to support those students, the journal reported.

Students who did not get an adequate K-12 preparation do not "come to us with a stigma," said Nelson. The graduation rate at Lincoln is 39 percent. "Our system, we try to help you and work with you."

"We know what you’ve gone through," he said, citing a recent report from earlier this spring that said half of a group of Philadelphia School District teachers who took subject-area certification exams to meet new middle school teaching requirements failed. More than half of Lincoln’s students come from Pennsylvania and the majority of those students are from Philadelphia.

Studies have also shown that curriculum offered in poor, big-city schools is "dumbed-down" from what is taught in more affluent suburban districts, according to a report on the persistent performance gap between minority and white students published by Education Week in 2000.

At the same time, black students -- particularly males -- who attend suburban schools also face challenges.

Black males who attend predominantly white school districts in Pennsylvania are labeled disabled at an 88.9 percent higher rate than their counterparts at predominantly minority districts, according to The Commonwealth Foundation, a public policy research and educational institute based in Harrisburg.

Studies have shown that in junior and senior high school, the numbers of black males identified as special education students decrease as the presence of black teachers increases, said Holmes.

Black males tend to have more success at the HBCUs because "they’re less likely to be stereotyped," he said, adding that students need an environment where they hear that they are smart and capable.

"You’ve got to have role models," Nelson said. "You’ve got to feel comfortable and you’ve got to feel good about yourself."

Lut Nero, dean of the library at Cheyney, said the country has failed to recognize, cultivate and tap what young black students have to offer.

A few weeks ago, Nero attended a spoken word program on campus where students recited poetry with the pace picking up with each phrase spoken. The form or style is called Spitten.

The "content is intense, accurate, challenging," and the poetry spoke to things cosmic, political and personal, he said. "The quality of the content is kind of what I’m seeing shows that these are brilliant -- these are brilliant -- young people and I think for so long, we’ve not been able to experience (their strengths) in society, because we assume they’re broke in some way."

Nero said HBCUs are in a particularly good position to tap those strengths because the concentration of students with similar experiences can allow the schools to focus on the teaching strategies that will help black students left behind in K-12 schools catch up and then to "kick it up to the next level."

Not all students come in unprepared for the rigors of undergraduate work, Nelson said, adding that about a third of all high school graduates, regardless of race, need remedial work to help them make the transition to college-level assignments.

HBCUs also offer black students their legacy as post-secondary institutions with a long history of producing graduates who are testimony to the accomplishments of their predecessors.

"If we look at where the majority of African American leadership in our country come from since the turn of the last century it has come out of the HBCUs," said Wallace C. Arnold, interim president at Cheyney.

Arnold, who headed the Army Reserve Officer Training Corps program in the early 1990s and is a retired two-star major general, received his undergraduate degree from Hampton University, a large HBCU in Virginia and the alma mater of Booker T. Washington.

Graduates of Cheyney include Ed Bradley of "60 Minutes," Robert W. Bogle, the publisher and CEO of the Philadelphia Tribune -- the nation’s oldest newspaper continuously owned and operated by blacks -- local politicians, including state Rep. Thaddeus Kirkland, D-159th, of Chester, and Joyce Evans, a news anchor on Fox 29.

Cheyney was founded by a Quaker in 1837 as a school to prepare blacks to teach and according to the school it is the oldest of the HBCUs. It is "an incredible piece of history," Arnold said.

Lincoln, known as the "Black Princeton" when Marshall was a student there, also graduated poet Langston Hughes in 1929, Nnamdi Azikiwe, the first president of Nigeria, in 1930 and Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana, in 1939. And eight Lincoln graduates went on to found as many schools of higher education for blacks, including five in the United States and three in Africa.

Lincoln was founded in 1854 and, according to the school, it was the first HBCU established exclusively as an institution of higher learning.

At a recent class reunion, Levan Gordon, a retired judge from the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas, pointed to a wall of pictures of famous graduates hanging in Lincoln’s Thurgood Marshall Living Learning Center. He said the pictures give students a sense of purpose. They can look at the wall and see "they can achieve that too," he said.

Cleo Young, who also graduated from Lincoln a few weeks ago, said he chose Lincoln because he wanted to learn more about his culture and to carry on the legacy.

"A lot of important people came here," said Young. "They paved the way."

Students said that by attending an HBCU they also get to learn about the history of blacks, including their struggles and contributions.

"The history is the most important thing ..just for the simple fact to remember where you came from ..what people had to do for you to be here now," said Ryan Walker, a junior and communications major at Cheyney.

"You want to be in a better scenario than they were," he said, noting that while he sees there has been progress, he also sees there is still work to be done to end racial discrimination. "It drives you."

At his predominantly Latino high school in the Bronx, N.Y., black history was mostly taught in February, Walker said. "Here, every day is Black History Month."

Hughes said black students seek out information about their past because those stories often got buried after the Brown decision. "One of the outcomes of Brown in some ways is really to heighten the sense of African-American interest (in history and) African-American culture," he said.

Though students interviewed at Cheyney and Lincoln often said they were attracted to the legacy, history lessons and cohesive student body the schools offered, at least a few said they were also attracted to the diversity of the campuses.

Simone Howell, a native of Jamaica who attended the Haverford School District when she moved to the U.S., said she liked the size of Lincoln’s international population.

"It gives you a chance to network," said Howell, who received a degree in business administration May 2 and plans to spend about a month in Africa this summer. She added that the population on campus offered a nice change for her after she had attended a largely white public school and two-year post-secondary school. Thirty-two countries outside the United States are represented at Lincoln, with 162 of the university’s 1,938 students coming from outside the country.

Richard King, of West Chester, who graduated from Cheyney in 1997, said the school taught him "to think globally" rather than racially or regionally and to "look through those stereotypical things that sometimes keep us apart."

?Daily Local News 2004

 

[EB]

.....

Ivory Nelson, president of Lincoln, the alma mater of Thurgood Marshall, lead attorney for the NAACP in the Brown case, said in the last five years, 26 percent of Lincoln?s graduates have majored in the sciences. "Where else are you going to find that many black kids graduating in the sciences?" asked Nelson, a chemist.

"The HBCUs are more efficient in producing a black middle class," said Neal Holmes, associate professor of political science at Cheyney who teaches courses on black history.

A report in the spring 2004 edition of the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education paints a less positive picture of HBCUs. It says that at a majority of the HBCUs, the graduation rate for black students is lower than the national graduation rate for black students, which is 39 percent.

But according to Rich Henson, former vice president for institutional advancement at Cheyney, many HBCUs often take on students with more significant challenges than majority white schools as part of their mission -- a characteristic the journal acknowledges.

Many of the students at the HBCUs come from low-income families and attended "poor quality, inner-city or rural, predominantly black high schools," the journal reported. Henson, a Cheyney alumnus, said the HBCUs want to give those students the opportunity to get a higher education but that when remedial help is not enough the students must leave, which affects the graduation rate.

At Cheyney, the rate is 30 percent, according to the journal, which also reported some students also drop out because they cannot afford the tuition. HBCUs typically have small and inadequate endowments to support those students, the journal reported.

Students who did not get an adequate K-12 preparation do not "come to us with a stigma," said Nelson. The graduation rate at Lincoln is 39 percent. "Our system, we try to help you and work with you."

"We know what you?ve gone through," he said, citing a recent report from earlier this spring that said half of a group of Philadelphia School District teachers who took subject-area certification exams to meet new middle school teaching requirements failed. More than half of Lincoln?s students come from Pennsylvania and the majority of those students are from Philadelphia.

Studies have also shown that curriculum offered in poor, big-city schools is "dumbed-down" from what is taught in more affluent suburban districts, according to a report on the persistent performance gap between minority and white students published by Education Week in 2000.

At the same time, black students -- particularly males -- who attend suburban schools also face challenges.

Black males who attend predominantly white school districts in Pennsylvania are labeled disabled at an 88.9 percent higher rate than their counterparts at predominantly minority districts, according to The Commonwealth Foundation, a public policy research and educational institute based in Harrisburg.

Studies have shown that in junior and senior high school, the numbers of black males identified as special education students decrease as the presence of black teachers increases, said Holmes.

Black males tend to have more success at the HBCUs because "they?re less likely to be stereotyped," he said, adding that students need an environment where they hear that they are smart and capable.

"You?ve got to have role models," Nelson said. "You?ve got to feel comfortable and you?ve got to feel good about yourself."

Some things need to be repeated.