Why historically black colleges remain relevant

Among their accomplishments are the following:. HBCUs have played an historical role in enhancing equal educational opportunity for all students. Fifty percent of black faculty in traditionally white research universities received their bachelor's degrees at an HBCU.

Department of Health and Human Services; and many black political leaders. Today, there are HBCUs with more than , students enrolled. Fifty-six institutions are under private control, and 51 are public colleges and universities. The public institutions account for more than two-thirds of the students in historically black institutions.

Most 87 of the institutions are four-year colleges or universities, and 20 are two-year institutions. In the past, more than 80 percent of all black college graduates have been trained at these HBCUs. Today, HBCUs enroll 20 percent of black undergraduates. However, HBCUs award 40 percent of baccalaureate degrees earned by black college students.

On April 28, , President George Bush issued Executive Order to strengthen the capacity of HBCUs to provide quality education and to increase their participation in federally sponsored programs. It mandates the taking of positive measures, by federal agencies, to increase the participation of HBCUs, their faculty and students, in federally sponsored programs.

It also encourages the private sector to assist HBCUs. This office also coordinates the activities of 27 federal departments and agencies in implementing Executive Order These agencies were selected for participation in the program because they account for 98 percent of federal funds directed to our colleges and universities.

Selecting a college in which to enroll is a very personal choice. However, HBCUs offer a valuable option for minority and nonminority students alike. Some of the factors that make HBCUs attractive include:. Many HBCUs have lower tuition and fees compared to traditionally white institutions. A number also offer a broad spectrum of financial assistance to qualified students and have extensive experience in identifying sources of financial support for deserving students.

Financial assistance may come in the form of scholarships, loans, and grants to cover the cost of tuition, fees, room and board, books, supplies, personal expenses, and transportation. HBCUs often serve students from a wide range of cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds. Students interested in the humanities, or in such areas as sociology, psychology, economics, government, urban planning, etc.

Nonresident aliens constitute a large portion of the student enrollment at many HBCUs. A number of foreign students and professors at HBCUs participate in student or faculty exchange programs. In general, HBCUs aim to be sensitive to the needs of foreign students and provide students an opportunity to associate with different nationalities and to learn about cultural diversities. Multicultural exposures are expected to become increasingly valuable as the demographics of the American work force change and America competes more aggressively in the world economy.

Today many HBCUs have a racially diverse students enrollment at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Also, the majority of HBCUs continue to have a racially diverse faculty and administration. HBCUs are presently more racially desegregated, with respect to their enrollment and staff, than traditionally white institutions.

HBCUs may offer a more supportive educational setting for students encountering some difficulty in realizing their full academic potential. HBCUs generally offer a broad range of effective remedial programs for students.

Many HBCUs have established developmental centers, reading laboratories, and expanded tutorial and counseling services to accommodate the special needs of educationally disadvantaged students. In addition, a strong commitment by many HBCUs to serve all students has resulted in high rates of graduation. Traditionally, the faculties at many HBCUs place as much, or more, emphasis on teaching and student service oriented activities as on research.

This permits more time for personal and high quality student-teacher interactions. In addition, many teachers at HBCUs have experience in working with minority students and students from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. Research findings indicate that these factors are important for the academic success of many minority students. As a result of the desegregation plans approved by OCR under Title VI, many state systems of higher education have placed new high demand programs and curricula-such as engineering, pharmacy, and computer science-at HBCUs.

Students considering options in postsecondary education are faced with one of the most difficult and important choices of their lives. Their decisions should lead to informed selections reflecting the broadest possible range of educational opportunities.

The Office for Civil Rights is committed to equality of opportunity in education. OCR conducts complaint investigations and compliance reviews to ensure Title VI requirements are being followed.

Richard Humphreys, a Quaker philanthropist, donated a tenth of his total estate to build the ICY in order to educate those of African descent. Two more Black institutions of higher learning were subsequently established: Lincoln University, also in Pennsylvania, in , followed by Wilberforce University in Ohio in Wilberforce has survived a particularly tumultuous history; the school was shut down during the Civil War due to financial losses, but was later purchased by the AME Church.

Although these three institutions showed that it was possible to offer a college education to Black people, progress was slow. In , the Supreme Court created a "separate but equal" precept in American education in Plessy v.

The Plessy decision was a turning point. It spurred the growth of existing HBCUs and led to the founding of more. Even more students—over 43,—were in public black colleges at that time and 3, were in graduate education. Concerns remained, though, that HBCUs were still under-funded, and that historically White institutions were only slowly desegregating.

That started to change with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of , which ensured equal opportunity in programs that received assistance from the federal government. The act also resulted in the creation of the OCR Office for Civil Rights , which worked into the s to eliminate school segregation. Today, there are colleges in the United States and U. Virgin Islands that are defined by the U. You can find the complete list here. Over the past century, HBCUs have helped to narrow the wage gap by race and reduce race and income inequality.

In addition:. HBCUs have also benefited from enhanced federal support over the past few decades. Former President George H. Virgin Islands. Of the HBCUs, 51 were public institutions and 50 were private nonprofit institutions.

The percentage of Black faculty at predominantly White universities who received their bachelor's degree from an HBCU. They offer students more support in their studies, often at a significantly lower cost than other colleges. Here are other ways in which choosing an HBCU can enhance the value of a higher education:. For students who are at risk of not completing college, HBCUs offer a nurturing, caring environment.

Minority campus staff and faculty members at HBCUs often have greater insight into the difficulties of attending college than their colleagues at other schools. HBCUs are regarded as having special expertise when it comes to educating lower-income students. And HBCUs spend about two thirds of the total revenue per student that most other universities in the United States spend, which helps make them more affordable for students from lower income families to enroll.

Students of color feel more at home, and are more likely to succeed, when they attend schools where they feel supported and welcomed. For many students from Black and minority backgrounds, that means attending an HBCU will lead to better educational outcomes. A recent Gallup-Purdue poll found that HBCU graduates were likelier to have felt supported while they were attending college than their Black peers who attended and graduated from predominantly White educational institutions.

Diversity can have benefits for students from majority backgrounds as well, because it allows them to get to know minority students and become more knowledgeable about their cultures and the adversities they can face in society.

Yet the quality of the education they provide is comparable to that of more expensive institutions. Their lower cost—which eliminates or reduces student debt, especially for low- and middle-income families—can help narrow the racial wealth gap between Blacks and Whites. The point is, HBCUs played a crucial role in transforming how America was to understand and envision what it meant to be black following the Civil War.

And throughout the years, these schools have served as incubators for future generations of freedom fighters. It was HBCUs, for example, where the carefully crafted educational strategies that birthed the mass protests and civil unrest of the s and s emerged , a fact that many people today may fail to appreciate adequately. HBCUs influenced the character of the black liberation struggle. They trained the leaders and served as key sites of exchange where ideals about the best paths toward freedom took shape.

Without this school, our understanding of equality and access would be quite different. It was Howard graduates who would use the law to challenge the idea that separate educational facilities could ever produce equal outcomes for black Americans.

Thurgood Marshall , the lawyer who would argue the Brown v Board of Topeka case and later became a Supreme Court justice, emerged from this environment. He came up with a brilliantly constructed critique of racially segregated education that persuaded the Supreme Court to strike down the system. Predictably, black schools faced many challenges. From the start, defenders of white supremacy have understood HBCUs as spaces intricately connected to the fight for civil rights and black liberation.

For instance, southern state legislative bodies routinely diverted money away from HBCUs, leaving the schools to operate on razor-thin budgets. In the s, foundations urged the schools to limit their curriculum to politically neutral yet economically relevant subjects such as domestic service and agriculture, which were not likely to inspire students to challenge a system that denied their humanity.

And I can agree that if we understand the role of HBCUs only in terms of the numbers educated, then these schools are not as relevant to the majority of black Americans as they once were. However, if we are to understand the role of HBCUs as vehicles of freedom and black liberation, then they still have an important role within our society.