Who Can Teach Today’s Under-prepared Black College Student?

By

Sherman N. Miller

 8/26/2006

Jay P. Greene and Marcus A. Winters offer some very chilling prospectus for African Americans going to college in their February 2005 article, Public High School Graduation and College-Readiness Rates: 1991-2002. “. . . About 40% of white students, 23% of African-American students, and 20% of Hispanic students who started public high school graduated college-ready in 2002.”

            Since Traditionally White Colleges and Universities are seeking black students today, the above statement suggests that the few black students graduating high school who are college ready might expect many colleges to pursue them. On the other hand, in yesteryear these prepared black students may have been solely in the providence of Historically Black Colleges and Universities because racial segregation guaranteed HBCU student bodies. The obvious business decision for HBCUs is to establish a modern day niche market where they help today’s 77 percent of black students needing background enhancement become college graduates during perhaps a six year student tenure.

            The real issue here is that the recipe for yesterday’s HBCU success is no longer applicable to today’s paradigm. Kevin Carey, in an article A Matter of Degrees: Improving Graduation Rates in Four-Year Colleges and Universities, offers the HBCU leadership plenty to ponder when debating how to handle the 77 percent of black students needing background enhancement:

“Elizabeth City State University is an undergraduate university in northeastern North Carolina. ECSU is a Historically Black Institution, founded in 1891. It has a student body of about 2,000, of whom three-fourths are African American, and two-thirds of whom have family incomes low enough to qualify for federal Pell Grants. ECSU is listed as “less competitive” by Barron’s Profiles of American Colleges, a popular guidebook for prospective students. This relatively open admissions policy is reflected in a below-average SAT profile for incoming freshmen, who have a median combined score of approximately 835 out of 1600.

There are 30 colleges and universities in the United States that are roughly similar to ECSU: “less competitive” baccalaureate or masters-granting institutions with fewer than 5,000 undergraduates and a median SAT score between 760 and 900. The median graduation rate among those institutions is 39% for all students, and 37% for African American students. Graduation rates in some institutions are 20% or below.

ECSU, by contrast, had a graduation rate of 53% for all students and 60% for African American students in 2002. This isn’t a one-year anomaly. ECSU has reported graduation rates in this range in every year they’ve been collected by the Department of Education.

Elizabeth City State University is one of many colleges and universities across the country that routinely and consistently outperform their peers. Given similar students, resources, and institutional missions, they simply do better, year after year.”

            When black students and black parents start to think about Elizabeth City State University degree offerings, they may conclude that this university is an excellent HBCU for there is a better than 50 percent chance that you will get the coveted bachelor level degree in six years. One might argue that ECSU has learned to service its niche market of the 77 percent of black students needing background enhancement well. Just think about the fact that each black student needing background enhancement that Elizabeth City State University helps to come up to national academic standards and graduates pumps an additional 2.1 million dollars into a black household over the student’s lifetime.  

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