White students attending HBCU?
 

what are your thoughts on this?

- marissa

When I went on a tour of the HBCU's as part of a trip for our Common Book...didn't seem to be a big deal. The students that we met seemed to be interested in our experience and what it was like to be a majority turned minority. I think that students should study at the university that fits their needs, HBCU, historically white, Jewish, Catholic, or whatever.

I don't have a problem with it at all. I used to attend an HBCU, and while I was okay with it, alot of people there did not like the idea of, and the non black students that attended.

Kinda weird to me, I always wonder why are they there? Do they have a case of negrophilia or what? But a lot of them (not all) have a fraction of black in their blood and just wanted to see the part of their heritage that they never got to see. I know one girl who fits that category and she's cool. All the rest aren't really White American, they're study abroad students from countries where they have always mixed with darker people, so it's not a big deal.

There were whites that attended my HBCU. Nothing strange - just a good school. And (how can I say this)......the majority of them weren't "wanna be's" or anything like that. They were just themself and didn't try to fit any particular idea as to what was "black".

Granted all the ones I knew are now married to someone black, but that's another thread. lol

Tarry on....

i would still be a 8th year sophomore at an HBCU.

:cool:

OR...they could just be interested in pharmacy, agriculture, architecture or engineering, and their state offers full-tuition scholarships for people from in-state (regardless of race) who want to study those things.

I can only speak for my state, but in certain programs (pharm, forestry, and arch) the white students make up a higher percentage of enrolled students than black students. The programs are, simply, the best in the state, at a smallish school, and not very expensive.

But yeah...it sounds like negrophilia to me. :rolleyes:

While I attended Grambling, I noticed Caucasian students, Latin/Hispanic students and Asian students. They lived in the dorms, ate in the cafe, played sports, went to class, joined frat and sororities, etc..

Sure, at one point I wondered why. But then it occured to me. GSU in particular, is a cheap school that offers 4 year degrees that could get a student a job after graduation. :)

Negrophilia:eek: What about just getting a different cultural experience at an HBCU and taking advantage of what it has to offer!

There was a bit of talk lately about how HBCUs have underperformed lately and the administrations have looked into bringing in white students with better performance and possibly more money to help out.

There was also an article about Russian students at Alcorn State a couple years ago in the New York Times.

Interesting reads.

-Rudey

Many HBCU's are underfunded. Their alumni giving is piss-poor at best. And their infrastructure costs are escalating. Several predominantly majority universities have provided some level of collaborative schooling with HBCU's. However, many of the students do not pursue these programs, actively, depending on what program. Meaning, if there are immediate benefits from the program, they will pursue it. If it takes time to get it off the ground, the build up process is slow.

Interestingly, many foreign professors come to work at these schools to get established in their academic fields. There may be minor teaching loads. However, they get what they need, then leave to a better school. I know of one professor from China that is working at Morehouse School of Medicine and teaching biology at Morehouse College. And once one professor finishes, he or she usually recruits another from their area... That is how education gets perpetuated now at an HBCU.

Some graduates that have higher degrees sometimes come back to an HBCU because of the same job opportunities. However, there is more politics that plays a role in that process than hiring a foreign professor--namely, and unfortunately, the pay... You can pay a foreign professor less than a Ph.D. from the states.

But I think the most damaging aspect of many HBCU's are the infrastructure costs. It costs money to run a college. Most students are on some financial aid. And alumni are not endowing buildings like they could be doing. And the fact that back in the mid-1970's all the HBCU left the NCAA... That hurt them tremendously.

Should formalized integration occur? Maybe. Can it occur without loss of historical perspective? I dunno.

This article just came out in the NY Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/03/ed...pagewanted=all

August 3, 2005
Little-Noticed Crisis at Black Colleges
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
HOUSTON

IN a classroom of white walls and black students, an air-conditioned sanctuary from a sweltering July morning, Devon Moore walked toward the front table with his homework. He had clipped out a newspaper article and now gave a one-sentence synopsis of its subject, safety problems in pickup trucks. He identified a word new to him, "adjacent," and a word that used a prefix or suffix, "faulty." He was less than four weeks from starting his freshman year of college.

Devon had passed up a senior-class trip to Atlanta to enroll in the Summer Academy at Texas Southern University here, and at the outset of the eight-week session, he had wondered why. Having graduated from high school, he figured, "I already knew everything there was to learn." That illusion crashed and burned on Day 1, when the math instructor taught a lesson on slope and even gave an overnight assignment.

For some 185 incoming freshmen like him, and indeed for Texas Southern as an institution, the summer courses in reading, writing, and math form one front in a battle to reverse a disturbingly low graduation rate. Of the students who received diplomas last May, only 6 percent had earned their degree in the normal four years, and only 21 percent in six years. Those numbers, incredibly, reflected improvement from prior rates.

In its problem and its challenge, Texas Southern has plenty of company. Nationally, the historically black colleges and universities have a six-year graduation rate of 38 percent, according to The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. That is slightly lower than the figure for black students at all other institutions, and roughly 40 percentage points lower than for blacks at elite schools. The situation amounts to a little-noticed crisis in the very institutions that, for their size, play a disproportionate role in educating African-Americans.

A half-century after Brown v. Board of Education, 40 years after Lyndon Johnson's speech endorsing the concept of affirmative action, and two years after the Supreme Court upheld racial diversity as a factor in admissions, the approximately 80 historically black colleges and universities still enroll more than 10 percent of the African-American students in higher education and award close to 20 percent of degrees.

These black institutions have produced leaders from Thurgood Marshall to Jesse Jackson to Spike Lee. Their step shows, marching bands, and fraternities and sororities have become integral elements of African-American culture. It is a commonplace in black churches and neighborhoods for parents to believe that their children will have better outcomes in black colleges than in mostly white ones, because the black schools provide a more nurturing, supportive environment, free of white presumptions that blacks are intellectual inferiors or expectations they should portray the role of hip-hop gangsta.

But what happens when the truism appears less and less true? What happens when an education emergency is ignored except by those enduring it?

These are precisely the questions Texas Southern has dealt with, particularly since Priscilla D. Slade became president in 1999. The university has its roots in the civil rights struggle, because it was created by the State of Texas in reaction to the lawsuit of a black man who had been denied admission to the state's all-white law schools.

From that rather cynical genesis, Texas Southern has gone on to educate such political figures as the Congressional members Barbara Jordan and Mickey Leland. With about 11,000 students, 85 percent of them black, it teaches five times as many African-Americans as does the flagship campus of the University of Texas in Austin.

What pushed the six-year graduation rate nearly into single digits earlier this decade were factors, both educational and financial, that affect scores of black institutions nationwide. With the desegregation of colleges and universities in the South and the increased recruiting of black students by top universities, what W. E. B. DuBois famously called the "talented tenth" no longer heads to places like Texas Southern by default. In fact, the top 10 percent of graduates from any Texas high school are guaranteed admission to the state university system.

As a result, the students who come to Texas Southern arrive less prepared and sometimes less committed than their forebears. Roughly one-third of them require remedial classes before they can enter college-level courses. More than 100 of the available spaces in the Summer Academy went unclaimed, even though the program charges no tuition and provides a stipend for books that is worth several hundred dollars.

WHY don't they attend? That's the question of the decade," said Dr. Jacqueline Fleming, the director of Texas Southern's academic center. "The single biggest factor is a lack of motivation. Their world is BET, ghetto rap, going to school dressed like you're going to a club. They're here because their grandmother said to be here, or because their parole officer said it was this or jail."

Having taught at Barnard College, Dr. Fleming has seen plenty of anti-intellectualism in more rarefied settings, too. But those students came from families with means and with multigenerational legacies of college education. More than 40 percent of Texas Southern's students represent the first generation in their families to attend college and more than one-quarter have annual household incomes below $20,000.

The economic impact hobbles black colleges and institutions themselves. For in higher education, the prevailing rule of fund-raising is that the rich get richer. Texas Southern has an endowment of $6 million; across town, Rice University has $3 billion. The best endowed historically black institution, Howard University in Washington, ranks 132nd in the nation with $371 million, according to a survey by the National Association of College and University Business Officers.

The interest from a large endowment means money for scholarships, research grants and support services, among other things, and all are vital for institutions dealing primarily with students from the working class or below. The gap between the money available from federal Pell grants and even the modest costs here - about $7,200 yearly for tuition, room and board for Texas residents - has widened substantially over the past decade. Classes compete with jobs for priority. Dr. Bobbie Henderson, director of a center providing social services to students and their families, recently had to find housing for a dean's list student, already working at McDonald's, who had been reduced to living with her 16-month-old daughter in a car.

Against these obstacles, President Slade has undertaken a variety of efforts, from a partnership with a nearby high school to the Summer Academy to on-campus day care for students' children to several fund-raising drives. The radio and television host Tavis Smiley has given $1 million of a projected $10 million over 10 years to the journalism school, which now bears his name. Former President George H. W. Bush, a Houston resident, leads a capital campaign with a goal of $50 million. Some $15 million has already come in, and a new science building is under construction.

Without an array of wealthy alumni, Dr. Slade has turned to corporate leaders and private philanthropists in the city in a separate attempt to build up the paltry endowment. "This is my hit list," she said in her office in late July, brandishing a roster of prominent people to call. A professor of accounting and dean of the business school before being named president, she makes her sales pitch based not on pity or compassion but on bottom-line competitiveness.

"You live in the city of Houston," she said, recalling a recent appeal to an executive. "You have a business in the city of Houston. I'd venture that 10 percent of the people who work for you went to Texas Southern. We prepare individuals to work for you. You should want them to be as well prepared as possible. And you know who educates the largest number of those students."

-Rudey

This is not true.

Re: White students attending HBCU?
 

I don't see a problem with it, but I guess that is because I attend one. When I was looking for scholarships during my senior year of high school, I found that UTEP is a HBCU. Its hard to really see that when you are at the campus, beacuse the majority of the students are still Latino/Hispanic (mainly mexican).