HBCU-Levers

Types of Affirmative Action -- Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (DrB_2Kxx) — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 15:33:00 +0000

All affirmative action programs for minority students are not the same. Most fall somewhere in between two ideal types: "diversity" programs and "compensatory" programs:

Diversity Programs recruit minority students who are equal in all academically relevant respects to the college's majority students, e.g. SAT scores, GPAs, advanced placement courses, extracurricular activities, community service, etc. However, the fact that there are far fewer of these students in the pool of graduating seniors each year means that a college recruiting team must invest far more time and energy proactively searching for these gifted and talented prospects and persuading them to attend the team's college than they spend recruiting comparable majority students.

Harvard College and other elite private colleges that adhere to this strategy search for qualified applicants like prospectors searching for "black" and "brown" gold. Indeed, the "affirmative action" that's taken by these elite schools refers to the extra effort and expense they invest in recruiting minority students before they are admitted. After that, their minority students sink or swim just like their majority students using the same resources that are available to their majority students.
Compensatory Programs recruit minority students who have comparable aptitude to the majority students currently enrolled in a college, but have deficiencies in their prior academic preparation. So they may have lower SAT scores and GPAs, may not have taken as many advanced placement courses, engaged in fewer extracurricular activities, or done less community service. The "affirmative action" in such programs is the commitment made by the college to provide their minority students with access to compensatory programs after they are admitted. These additional resources will enable them to graduate, possibly in a longer period of time than their majority students, but with comparable preparation for graduate school or entry into the work force.

Each ideal strategy has advantages and disadvantages:

Expense
Most public colleges adhere to a compensatory strategy. Indeed, it would be difficult for public institutions to justify the considerably larger investments per student required by a diversity recruitment strategy.
Stigma
Minority students recruited through a diversity program carry considerably less stigma. Majority students soon discover that their minority colleagues may not be as affluent or as well traveled as they are, but they are their academic equals.
Limited Pools
Unfortunately, the supply of academically prepared minority students is limited, so they are likely to gravitate towards the elite private colleges that can afford to recruit them. If the nation's colleges only operated diversity programs, most minority students would be denied the opportunity to develop their academic aptitudes to their fullest potential, which would be scandal and a shame because, as the UNCF motto reminds us, "A mind is a terrible thing to waste"
Risks
Diversity programs require substantially higher up-front investments in recruitment, but entail substantially lower backside risks of failure. Indeed, the graduation rates of blacks and other minorities at Harvard and other elite colleges are negligibly lower than the graduation rates of their majority students.

By contrast, compensatory programs have lower up-front investments in recruitment, but entail substantially higher backside risks of lower retention and lower graduation rates for their minority students.

Unfortunately, these risks have been exacerbated in recent years by unrealistic expectations. If minority students have academic deficiencies upon entry, e.g., in basic math skills and writing, it is absurd to expect them to graduate at the same four or six year rates as majority students who don't have such deficiencies. Successful completion of the developmental programs designed to help them overcome these initial deficiencies takes time that must be added to the time that students require to complete the requirements for the degree programs in which these students enroll.

Overly optimistic estimates of the size of the gaps in academic preparation that can be overcome by a college's compensatory courses, tutoring programs, and other developmental initiatives are especially risky in STEM programs, but most particularly in the cumulative, tightly sequenced courses offered in many engineering curricula. For example, a freshman's marginal understanding of high school algebra can lead to insufficient mastery of first semester calculus that can prevent him or her from completing the introductory courses in physics that are prerequisites to just about every course that follows. For tightly sequenced, cumulative programs, the shibboleth that students who enter with deficient academic preparation will somehow catch up by the end of three of four years is just that, a shibboleth that is more likely to lead to transfers into "easier" majors ... or to the students flunking out.

Finally, these two strategies are ideal types at the opposite ends of a spectrum of possibilities; so the affirmative action programs run by most colleges fall somewhere in between the two. In other words, most affirmative action programs involve some mixture of more intensive recruitment followed by compensatory initiatives after admission.

Note: This distinction between "diversity" and "compensatory" programs was first developed by Maya A. Beasley, PhD, in her senior honors thesis at Harvard University in 1997 in the Department of Sociology under the supervision of Professor William Julius Wilson. Dr. Beasley's thesis applied this typology to an analysis of the affirmative action programs run by three prominent colleges in the Boston metropolitan area.

Fight or Flight

noreply@blogger.com (DrB_2Kxx) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 06:15:00 +0000

A. Immigrants and Emigrants

When faced with imminent physical danger, we instinctively make an unconscious choice: fight or flight, i.e., resist the threat or run away. This primitive reflex arises at higher levels when we confront significant problems, i.e., highly undesirable circumstances. We strive to improve our circumstances or we move to more hospitable physical, social, or economic environments.

Of course, our conscious choices can only be regarded as rational if we have the skills and the resources to improve our circumstances and/or the skills and resources required to move. So much for abstract frameworks; now let's get real.

Most workers are relatively immobile, acting as though they were as rooted to their native countries as firmly as medieval European peasants were rooted to their countryside; however, the exceptions have changed our nation time and again. It's a cliche, but nonetheless true despite being a cliche, to say that we are a nation of immigrants -- with the notable exceptions of Native Americans.

The ancestors of most of the other Americans came here as voluntary immigrants by the millions back then to improve their circumstances; and immigrants are still choosing to come here voluntarily by the millions today -- legally or illegally. Courage is one of the most important "skills" these immigrants needed in order to get here from way over "there", a skill they then invested in taking further risks to make the most of the greater opportunities they were looking for when they came here, and thereby helped to build whatever part of this country they eventually settled. On the other hand, the millions of slaves who came here involuntarily required a different kind of courage to survive.

And then there are the emigrants, a term I am using to refer to people who move out of one part of the country into another, but also to people who move out of one set of socioeconomic circumstance into another. Both kinds of emigrants need courage to push beyond existing frontiers. The legendary "pioneers" pushed the boundaries of the nation further and further west in wave after wave that fulfillmed America's "manifest destiny." It took considerable courage to be a western pioneer ... but, as a black American, I can't help noting that it also took considerable indifference/hostility to the rights of the Native Americans who had already settled those "vacant lands."

B. The Greatest and Second Greatest Generations
As a black American, I am especially mindful of another group of pioneers, the successive generations of courageous black activists who pushed the frontiers of freedom in wave after wave, beginning with their emancipation. Whereas some have argued that the "Greatest Generation" of (mostly white) Americans were the brave soldiers and sailors who fought against tyrannical enemies in World War II, I have long believed that the "Greatest Generation" of black Americans were the ex-slaves who lifted themselves and their children up from mass ignorance into mass literacy in the decades following the Civil War.

And my nominee for the "Second Greatest Generation" of black Americans would be the courageous activists who risked their lives to wage the successful Civil Rights Revolution in the 1960s in strenuous efforts to complete the journey of black Americans from slavery to freedom.

Unfortunately, the journey wasn't completed, so there is still much work to be done. Many of us anticipated that far greater progress would have been made between the audacious 60s and today than actually occurred. Significant achievement gaps between blacks and whites narrowed, then displayed an obnoxious persistence. Obviously we need a few more waves of pioneers to reach our destination.

But as I grow older, I am saddened to note that courage, like other human qualities, ebbs and flows from one generation to the next. One generation's record breakers may be followed by another generations' regression to the mean. My sadness has also tempered some of the elation that I would have otherwise felt by the publication of my younger daughter's first book, Opting Out, Losing the Potential of America's Young Black Elite (Maya A. Beasley, University of Chicago Press, November 2011). Warning: the next few paragraphs contain shameless plugs from a very proud Daddy ... :-)

My daughter's book is an expanded and greatly enhanced version of the PhD dissertation that she wrote while she was at Stanford University. She begins her "Acknowledgements" as follows:

"The inspiration for this book comes from my time in Palo Alto toward the end of dot-com boom. As a graduate student living on a small stipend, I was keenly aware of the immense wealth flowing through Silicon Valley and the opportunities being taken up by young professionals. As a woman of color, however, I was also acutely aware of the dearth of African Americans that were a part of this phenomenon. I had known many intelligent, creative black students during my college years at Harvard, and as a graduate student at Stanford I had encountered a diverse undergraduate student body. I wondered how it was that Harvard and Stanford had relatively large black undergraduate populations, yet so few of the professionals I observed off campus were black."

After reviewing the relavant literature that provides extensive support for her findings, her book presents an exploratory study of the career decisions that were made by 30 black undergraduates at Berkeley and Stanford . She focused on the decisions that many of them made not to pursue careers for which they were qualified in high paying, high prestige fields -- e.g., science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), and finance -- after they correctly or incorrectly perceived the existence of racism among the predominantly white members of the faculty who taught the courses that led to the degrees that provided entry to those professions and among the practitioners of those professions. Many of these elite students opted instead for careers in more "racialized" fields, her term for fields that already contained a substantial number of black professionals. In other words, they chose not to become pioneers.

My daughter sent me chapters from time to time as she was writing her dissertation, and I recall my blood pressure soaring by thirty or forty points on each reading. Her quotes of the students' explanations for why they were opting out were all the more galling to me coming behind her quotation from one of my personal intellectual heroes at the beginning of her first chapter,

"The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men." (W.E.B. DuBois, "The Talented Tenth," 1903)

Given such golden opportunities, how could these highly talented youngsters not want to become pioneers?

C. The Third Greatest Generation and Second Thoughts

When I wrote the first version of this essay about two months ago, I stopped at the end of the preceding paragraph. I was not only saddened by my daughters' findings that so many of the students in her sample underperformed in the face of racism as per psychologist Claude Steele's findings about "stereotype threat", but by the painful irony that, even as her book was being delivered to the stores, my daughter was confronting circumstances in her own employment that were uncomfortably akin to the ones the students had hoped to avoid.

But since then, I have been re-reading sections of her book, especially the sections that indicated that the students' perceptions were not based so much on their own direct encounters with racism, but on the more extensive experiences of their parents and other friends and relatives in their parents' generation, the generation that walked through the doors in the 70s and 80s that were opened by the Civil Rights Activists in the 60s. They learned from their elders what racism looks like when you're one of the first to integrate an organization or a work place, how ugly it is, and how painful it can be.

But as my daughter and I continued to discuss her findings, a new possibility emerged. Perhaps the students she interviewed at the beginning of the New Millennium had only learned half of the lessons their parents and relatives might have taught them? Perhaps their parents didn't teach the other half because they were hoping that times had changed enough so that those other lessons wouldn't be necessary?

Whereas the Second Greatest Generation fought their integration battles in the glare of the nation's media, the battles fought by the generation that followed them through the doors of integration were solitary skirmishes and barely noted. Like soldiers coming home from an unpopular war, there were no media to mark their triumphs, no parades to thank them for their service. So the question is:

How did that next generation, the Third Greatest Generation if you will, conjure up the courage to persevere unnoticed, to quietly become the first black Americans to integrate so many fields and so many work places that were hitherto bastions of segregation that their children had the option to fall back into these now safer "racialized" occupations because the racists had been quelled?

And then I watched Soledad O'Brien's excellent documentary on CNN, "Black in America, the New Promised Land: Silicon Valley" ... actually, I watched it on TV, then downloaded it to my Mac and watched it three more times!!! If you haven't seen it yet, stop reading this essay, click the link in the previous sentence, download the video from iTunes, and watch it right now!!!

OK, I apologize. That's a bit over the top. But the video is a brilliant example of TV journalism at its best. Whereas Ms. O'Brien noted that there were no black entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, my daughter had identified the blockage in the pipeline at the source, at Berkeley and Stanford, the elite colleges that supplied a hefty percentage of the Valley's engineers-turned-entrepreneurs. If talented black students were opting out, it follows that Ms. Obrien's camera crew would have difficulty finding any black entrepreneurs ... except for the ones who just moved from all over the country into the high-tech boot camp in a house in the Valley for nine weeks to prepare to make do-or-die presentations to fat-cat venture capitalists. These were the black entrepreneurs whom the camera crew followed around day-after-day as the stars of Ms. O'Brien's reality TV documentary.

I won't spoil your fun by summarizing the video, except to say that for me, the high point came when an Indian professor, as in, a dark-skinned professor born in India, challenged the entrepreneurs to acknowledge three undeniable facts:

Many black Americans seem to feel that past injustice will entitle them to special treatment in the future. It doesn't work that way.
The only substantial help they would receive would be the help they gave to each other
Prejudice in the Valley was still so powerful that they should seriously consider hiring well-spoken white students from Berkeley or Stanford to make their presentations to venture capitalists on their behalf -- which is what the dark-skinned professor had been advised to do many years ago when he was starting his own company.

After he rubbed their noses into the harsh realities of ongoing prejudice, after the shock of his comments settled in, the black wannabe entrepreneurs did not exhibit a "stereotype threat" response. They didn't opt out. They buckled down and helped each other make the best presentations of their lives!

Yes, courage ebbs and flows from one generation to the next, but the good news from this video is that it's flowing again. It's flowing ... :-)

______________________
Related notes:

The Paralysis of Racism

The Paralysis of Racism

noreply@blogger.com (DrB_2Kxx) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 02:07:00 +0000

By the end of the 20th century, "racism" had become such a "bad word", so politically incorrect that even racists took offense at being called "racist" ... Of course this didn't mean that racism had vanished; what it did mean was that our society had made substantial progress in the hundred years between the aftermath of the Civil War and the legacy of Civil Rights. In the heat of the moment it's sometimes difficult to keep things in perspective, to suppress one's feelings that nothing has changed.

Nevertheless as an African American, I must never delude myself into thinking that I have ever been subjected to the kind of violent racism that was inflicted on my mother's father, who was born a slave. Things have gotten substantially better, yet not nearly as much as justice demands. But as the world's Jewish community raised its fists and cried "Never Again!" after the Holocaust, American blacks raised theirs to say that the only acceptable direction is forward, that we are never going back to "that", ever, never.

It's useful to distinguish between two kinds of racism: individual and institutional. Individual racists betray themselves by the racist things they say and do; whereas institutional racism is built into an organization's structures and operating procedures, so its exposure usually requires statistical analysis.

For example, our suspicions would be raised if we discovered that only 5 percent of the police force was black in a city whose population was more than 30 percent black.

Or we might become suspicious of a city's voter registration requirements if only five percent of its black residents were registered.

Of course, both of these examples are so clear cut as to preclude explanations other than institutional racism. But in the real world, the data is rarely so indisputable nor are individual racists so clumsy as to utter the "N" word.

Nowadays, politically correct racists invoke euphemisms, e.g. Governor Romney's recent "anti-entitlement campaign strategy", and achieve their racist objectives by quietly perpetuating the structures and procedures of institutional racism. Worse still, politically correct racists cite the very statistics that should be used to demonstrate institutional racism to insinuate the inferiority of its black victims. As an educator, my favorite example is using statistics that document the persistent achievement gaps between black and white students, not as evidence that our schools and universities are failing our black students, but to insinuate that the black students are inherently inferior. As one of my black students said to me a long time ago in one of the first classes I ever taught, "Statistics is the white man's trick bag"

This misuse of institutional statistics by crypto-racists, like Governor Romney, paralyzes the thought processes and discussions that are essential for our society to continue to make progress in eradicating institutional racism. I must admit that whenever I detect racism, I become hypersensitive and furious ... and then I notice my non-racist white friends and colleagues moving on quiet tiptop out of range. There can be no dialogue until I calm down. Of course, being a to-the-bone-Libra, I eventually do calm down and coldly perceive the real danger: the inconvenient truth that lurks within the misused stats, a truth whose burdensome, unfair implications cannot be ignored.

For example, most of the professors in most colleges have minimal teaching skills. This should surprise no one because most professors receive no formal training as classroom instructors. Nevertheless substantial learning occurs in all colleges, even in classes taught by the most incompetent instructors. Why? Because students come to class with varying degrees of prior preparation and motivation that compensates for the pedagogical deficiencies of their instructors. Students who come with better preparation usually do better than students with less; and those with less have to work harder for their A's and B's. White students generally come to college with stronger academic backgrounds than black students; so the black students have to compensate for their deficient preparations by working harder. Like my grandmother once told me when I was a small child, a black man has to be "twice as smart as a white man and work twice as hard to get half as far." But that's unfair. So what. Black students have no choice but to grit their teeth and work harder.

For educators, especially for black educators like myself, the challenge is to develop more effective teaching methods that would make it easier for students with entering deficiencies to master the missing fundamentals as quickly as possible, then move into the deeper, more interesting aspects of a course's subject matter. And this is what makes teaching such an exciting opportunity today. Information technology has finally given educators the tools we need to meet this challenge ... but the challenge won't be met if blacks and whites are distracted and/or paralyzed by racism.

_______________________

Related notes:

Fight or Flight
Playing the Race Card
The White Man's Trick Bag
Academically Adrift -- A Dissenting View
At the Gates of Distraction

Playing the Race Card

noreply@blogger.com (DrB_2Kxx) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 02:05:00 +0000

I have long suspected that Speaker Gingrich and the other Republican candidates, except Governor Romney, lacked the cash reserves or the organizational skills to go the distance. Our presidential candidates seem to need two tries to get their election operations right, as demonstrated by the failure of Speaker Gingrich and Governor Perry to gather enough signatures to get on the ballots in the important Virginia primary.

This pattern makes President Obama's stunning first time victory in 2008 shine with even greater retrospective brilliance and makes Governor Romney's eventual nomination on his second try all the more likely. It's important to remember that the Republican primaries and caucuses are not winner-take-all affairs. So while our silly pundit corps will be focusing on who "won" in Iowa, New Hampshire, Florida, South Carolina, and Nevada, the Governor will be patiently tallying up his non-winning 2nd and 3rd place delegate counts like the proverbial tortoise overtaking the flashy-dashy hares.

I have also expect that the 2012 election will turn out to be the most vicious presidential contest in recent memory. After the Democratic and Republican Party conventions next summer, the Fall 2012 election campaign is likely to descend to unprecedented depths of ugly, with both sides blaring endless propaganda smears at each other in the national and local media.

On Christmas Day the New York Times reported that Governor Romney's latest campaign theme, "The Anti-Entitlement Strategy" raises the ugliest specter of all. I confess that the Governor's explicit playing of a thinly coded race card this early took me by surprise. Of course it was silly of me to have expected that he would have waited until much later in the game, especially when so many of the voters in these primaries will be the open and/or closeted members of the racist segments of the far right. Tacking to the right to win enough votes in the early primaries to be able to cinch the nomination later on requires that Romney be seen drinking with gusto from their bloodiest cups.

But Judgement Day is coming. November 6, 2012. Be there!!!

_____________________________
Related notes:

Playing the Race Card

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

noreply@blogger.com (DrB_2Kxx) — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 06:52:00 +0000

Fortunately for the rest of us, Dr. King was not just a man of great wisdom, but a man whose mastery of the written and spoken word enabled him to share his wisdom in a manner that made his sharing one of the unforgettable experiences of our lives. So on this day that we celebrate his birth, perhaps the best tribute we can render is to listen to some of what he said and read some of what he wrote, yet again:

"I Have a Dream" ...
Letter from a Birmingham Jail
"6 April 1963
My Dear Fellow Clergymen:
While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities "unwise and untimely." Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would have little time for anything other than such correspondence in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work. But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statement in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms" ... Please click here for the rest of Dr. King's letter. Thank you.

A Black Student is a Black Student is a Black Student

noreply@blogger.com (Roy B) — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 13:08:00 +0000

Although I have been a member of the faculty and then staff of an HBCU for almost forty years, I have never been comfortable with an attitude held by a small cadre of my colleagues, namely: that the black students at HBCUs were somehow more important than the black students who attended non-HBCUs, that they were the true carriers of the black high culture, and that they were would inevitably become the most eminent leaders of the black community.

This always struck me as the ultimate "blacker than thou game" ... and the most dangerous. Why? Because it tempts HBCUs into untenable arrogance -- to rest on the hard-earned laurels of their past achievements and neglect the equally hard work that will be required to attain comparable achievements in the future, and to politically naive expectations that HBCUs are entitled to American society's future support because of the substantial contributions that HBCUs made to that society in the past. But perhaps the most dangerous of all, it distracts HBCU educators from their historic mission, i.e., the education of black students.

The historic mission of HBCUs was to provide educational opportunities for the black students within their own institutions. This made sense in a bygone era when HBCUS enrolled over 90 percent of all African American college students. But given that HBCU enrollment of African American students today is closer to 10 percent and declining, it is a recipe for extinction. Close to 90 percent and rising of today's African American students attend non-HBCUs, the integrated mainstream institutions, integrated by virtue of the courageous efforts of the Civil Rights activists of the 1960s and 1970s who risked their lives to bring an end to the injustice of the American systems of de jure and de facto segregation.

Unfortunately, the victorious legacy of their bravery has been undermined by substantial and persistent academic achievement gaps between black and white students at those mainstream institutions. Where should African American students and their families look to for leadership in the strenuous and longterm efforts that will be required to close these gaps in the future? I submit that HBCUs must play an outsized role in this struggle. Most of us who became members of the faculty and staffs of HBCUs in the past did so because we thought that HBCUs were the places where we could best leverage our limited talents to help provide the best educational opportunities for the greatest number of black students. I submit that HBCUs still offer those advantages today ... but only if we broaden our perspectives to include an abiding concern for the the 90 percent of America's black students who don't attend HBCUs.

Mind you, I am not suggesting that the faculty and staff at non-HBCUs should not be concerned about enhancing the opportunities they provide to their black students. I am merely acknowledging that these other institutions will find it more difficult to focus their creative energies on their black students lest they be accused of neglecting the needs of the vast majority, i.e., their non-black students.

I am suggesting that HBCUs must become national centers for the development, assessment, and dissemination of educational innovations that improve the academic performance of their own black students AND of the academic performance of black students everywhere else.

And given that successful alumni are the ultimate proof of the effectiveness of innovations in education, I am also suggesting that HBCUs should not only celebrate the achievements of their own alumni; they should also celebrate the achievements of black alumni from everywhere else ... if only because non-HBCUs seem to be so reluctant to take pride in their own black success stories. Yes, it's important for black students at the University of XYZ to learn during Black History Month that an eminent black scientist, engineer, or financial analyst graduated from an HBCU forty years ago; but it would be even better for those black students to learn about the eminent black scientists, engineers, and financial analysts who graduated from their own U of XYZ twenty years ago.

__________________________
Related notes:

From HBCUs to BCUs

The White Man's Trick Bag

noreply@blogger.com (DrB_2Kxx) — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 19:59:00 +0000

This note was published as an op ed by "Inside Higher Education" on Tuesday, 10/18/11.

Inside Higher Education -- Views

Google+ vs. Facebook

noreply@blogger.com (Roy B) — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 06:10:00 +0000

Google opened membership in Google+ to the general public this week (Monday 20 September 2011) with its Web pages firing provocative shots across Facebook's bow:

"Google+ makes connecting on the web more like connecting in the real world. Share your thoughts, links and photos with the right circles."
"You share different things with different people. But sharing the right stuff with the right people shouldn’t be a hassle. Circles make it easy to put your friends from Saturday night in one circle, your parents in another, and your boss in a circle by himself, just like real life."

In other words, Google is positioning Google+ ... a/k/a "GPlus" and "G+" ... as a Facebook killer. In my opinion, this is a marketing blunder because it presumes that a substantial portion of Facebook's 800 million users want their social network platform to create accurate cyberspace models of their real-life social networks.

I'll grant that most Facebook members might welcome a few more categories beyond friends, friends of friends, and everyone on the Internet. Indeed, Facebook recently introduced a new category called "close friends". However I doubt that most Facebook users want to carefully calibrate their social relationships, upgrading some from time to time, downgrading others. This makes me suspect that the designers of G+ confused the broad sociological concept of "social networks" that embraces all human relationships with the colloquial denotation of "social networks" that refers to social life after working hours.

Yes, G+ really does enable its users to easily construct far more accurate models of their social relationships than Facebook:

G+ allows users to create as many social circles as they want, assign whatever names they want, and create circles that overlap. In other words, a G+ user can put a contact into more than one circle.
And because users can provide any names to their circles, G+ permits users to define mixed and negative categories, such as "adversary" "competitor" "enemy" "frenemy" and "mortal enemy"
But best of all, a user's social models on G+ are as private as the models they carry in their heads because the names of a user's circles and the members of those circles are secrets that remain hidden from the other users of G+ ... Contrast this to Facebook's requirement that "friends" must mutually friend each other and that a user's list of friends can be seen by other Facebook members.

While I can't imagine that most Facebook users would want to create such refined categories of positive and negative relationships for their after hours social lives, I am equally certain that most white collar professionals will relish the availability of a well-designed free tool that could help them manage the complex, overlapping relationships in their workplace.

In the workplace we see each other as members of overlapping teams, as providers of the particular skills and resources we need for our projects, as competitors for advancement, as frenemies, as dangerous enemies, etc, etc, etc. And we are forced to recalibrate our working relationships from time to time. So-called "office friendships" are more like diplomatic alliances -- maintained for only so long as they are useful. In the workplace we have to be careful about what we say, to whom, and when we say it. All of which brings me to the following insight:

G+ is for 9 to 5
Facebook is for evenings and weekends

In other words, G+ can advance our careers; whereas Facebook can enhance our social lives. G+ is for success; Facebook is for fun. The G+ circles will help us channel our messages to the precise recipients we need to reach; whereas Facebook allows us to interact with people we didn't even know existed (friends of friends ... and their friends) until they added a comment to one of our posts. To be sure, we should expect G+ and Facebook to copy each other's features from time to time. But these platforms serve fundamentally different purposes and require fundamentally different expectations from their users. Nevertheless, the same people could use both.

I close with a few caveats and predictions:

As Internet applications go, Facebook has been around for a long time -- so its underlying code is relatively mature, i.e, it's debugged, easy to learn, and easy to use. By contrast, G+ just popped out of beta testing (with 20 million beta testers); so it may still contain glitches that early users might find discouraging enough to walk away after giving it a few tries.
And there's always the possibility that a competitor for managing social relationships in the workplace will roar out of nowhere with a more appealing platform. However, I think G+ has some built in advantages that will enable it to buy sufficient time to overcome its current defects and to ward off would-be competitors.

Indeed, LinkedIn is probably the most likely competitor for workspace social networks. Whereas G+ helps users manage their relationships on their jobs, LinkedIn is for users who don't have jobs or are looking for better jobs. So LinkedIn might expand to cover users' relationships on their jobs ... or Google might buy LinkedIn ... :-)
Users who try G+ will be pleased by its tight integration with Google's other cloud-based applications that have gained widespread popularity -- e.g., Gmail, YouTube, Google docs, Picassa, blogs, calendar, and discussion forums -- all of which have powerful features that facilitate document sharing and collaboration. It also has a special app for smart phones running Google's popular Android operating system. (An app for iPhones is forthcoming)
Finally, in my opinion the G+ video chat feature called "hangouts" is the icing on the cake that will greatly enhance the value of its underlying circles. Being able to convene online video meetings with just the right people should interest a wide variety of knowledge workers, but I expect that IT professionals, salespersons, planners, design teams, management groups, project teams, students, faculty, community organizers, and political activists will find this feature especially appealing -- and all the more so if they also use Google's other cloud-based applications and attend these meetings via their iPhones or Android smart phones ... :-)

Readers interested in learning more about G+ are referred to the following discussions:

Google Plus ... short video from Google

Introduction to Google+ ... outrageous slides from Google ... :-)

Google+ Help Center ... all questions officially answered here by Google

From HBCUs to BCUs

noreply@blogger.com (Roy B) — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 23:34:00 +0000

This post was published on 8/3/10 by Inside Higher Education and can be found here:

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/08/03/beasley

Academically Adrift -- A Dissenting View

noreply@blogger.com (DrB_2Kxx) — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 17:39:00 +0000

This note was published by Inside Higher Education on 6/27/11
under the title "The Wrong Message." (The new title was their editor's choice)

Blacker Than Thou

noreply@blogger.com (DrB_2Kxx) — Thu, 04 Nov 2010 20:30:00 +0000

A. Mr. Riley's Inflammatory Editorial

When Mr. Jason L. Riley, an African American member of the editorial staff of the Wall Street Journal, published a defamatory piece about HBCUs on September 28th, 2010, I was surprised and disappointed. As the editor/manager of the Gateway to HBCUs, I have been conducting systematic reviews of their academic activities -- their teaching, learning, and community service -- for the last 15 years.

Given my own knowledge of HBCUs, I found that most of Mr. Riley's points were either incorrect or they merely reiterated some well-known deficiencies in the performance of some, but by no means all HBCUs. As an academic systems analyst, I recognize the importance of identifying problems as a first step towards developing solutions. However, when problems have been well-known for a long time, what purpose is served by high profile repetitions that don't make use of their high visibility to propose to constructive solutions?

But I was even more surprised and disappointed by the many ill-informed comments from readers that the Journal subsequently published on its Website -- not only by most of the comments that agreed with the Mr. Riley's attacks, but also by most of the comments that were supposed to be defending HBCUs against his attacks. Given the upscale demographics of the Journal's readership, how was it possible that so many of its readers knew so little about what HBCUs were actually doing?

A politically savvy colleague suggested that the Journal's publication of both Mr. Riley's essay and the readers' comments was a deliberate attempt by Mr. Rupert Murdoch, the Journal's very partisan Republican owner, to stir up racial conflict just a few weeks before the Congressional elections, conflict that would more likely benefit Republican challengers than Democratic incumbents. While I am usually slow to subscribe to conspiracy theories, I could not think of a more plausible explanation.

As I gave further consideration to most of the comments from the HBCU "defenders" I became more disturbed by their tone than by their factual errors, a tone that I heard again and again in subsequent weeks in numerous responses from other "defenders" that appeared on other Websites and in other printed publications, a tone that, in my opinion, will do more damage to HBCUs in the long run than Mr. Riley's ill-informed editorial that will probably be forgotten sometime in the near future.

B. HBCUs Are No Longer Synonymous With Black Higher Education

Intense loyalty to one's alma mater is expected; indeed, colleges encourage it and depend on it to motivate generous donations of money and other resources from their alumni. For students and alums of HBCUs, an attack on all HBCUs is tantamount to an attack on their individual alma maters that they will not tolerate. No problem.

I have a problem when defenders overreach, when they explicitly or implicitly assert that an attack on HBCUs is an attack all black higher education. This disturbes me because HBCUs are no longer responsible for the education of the vast majority of African Americans. Whereas there was a time, as recently as the 1960s, when HBCUs provided 80 to 90 percent of the higher education opportunities for African Americans, today their enrollments are closer to ten percent.

HBCUs are only responsible for their own successes and their own failures. They are not responsible for the second rate education that most African American students currently receive from most non-HBCUs as reflected by the fact that most African American students at the vast majority of non-HBCUs have substantially lower retention rates and substantially lower graduation rates than their Caucasian and Asian American peers.

I am commited to my core to Jefferson's assertion that "all men are created equal." Therefore I am equally committed to its obvious corollary that "all black men are created equal." So if 90 percent of all black students currently attend non-HBCUs, then I have to accept the consequence that HBCUs have become a marginal segment of black higher education. Their students are not "better than" or "blacker than" the vast majority of African American students who are being educated (or miseducated) at non-HBCUs. So HBCUs do not deserve a greater share of resources than their declining numbers represent. Hence those of us who are truly concerned with improving black higher education should direct the lion's share of our energies towards improving non-HBCUs ... unless ... unless HBCUs use their unique visibility in the national consciousness to assume a leadership role in improving the quality of the education that is received, not just by their own students, but by all African American students in all colleges and universities.

C. HBCUs as Past and Future Leaders of Black Higher Education

Most fair-minded observers acknowledge the contributions of HBCUs in times past; but given their small and declining share of black higher education today, what would enable them to provide effective leadership in the future? In my opinion, two characteristics provide HBCUs with substantial and continuing competitive advantages -- if we have sufficient wit to use them:

Organizational Diversity
All black men may have been are created equal, but all HBCUs are not the same. Indeed, there is such an extraordinary range of programs and productivity among HBCUs that in previous blogs I have argued that they provide an ideal "natural laboratory" for identifying the teaching and advisement strategies that are most effective for educating African American students.

Intellectual Diversity
HBCUs also provide a precious intellectual freedom for African Americans when dealing with race-related issues that is rarely found at predominantly white institutions to this day, a freedom that allows ideas proposed by African American faculty, staff, and students to be judged on their merits without regards to "What Black People Really Think" -- as prescribed by prominent black (and white) pundits in the nation's predominantly white media.

At HBCUs, where "everyone" is black, everyone knows that nobody speaks for all black people. When someone says something with which you disagree, you just shrug it off, saying "That's his or her opinion, but it's not my opinion." Counter-productive "blacker than thou" games can flourish at predominantly white colleges and universities and in predominantly white media, like the Wall Street Journal, wherein blacks represent a small percentage of the total community. But at HBCUs where "everyone" is black, the color of a speaker's skin is never part of the message.

The diversity of perspectives afforded by this intellectual freedom gives me hope that, sooner or later, HBCUs will develop creative solutions for the well documented problems in their own programs. More importantly, HBCUs will share their solutions with the nation's non-HBCUs and thereby contribute to improving the quality of the education received by all African American students.

_____________________________
Related notes:

From HBCUs to BCUs

The Best HBCUs in STEM

noreply@blogger.com (DrB_2Kxx) — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 17:30:00 +0000

The National Academies recently published another blue ribbon report that raises alarms about America's imminent decline as a major economic (and political) power due to our declining production of doctorates in science and technology relative to that of other nations. (See Expanding Underrepresented Minority Participation: America's Science and Technology at the Crossroads.)

The good news from an HBCU perspective is the report's explicit acknowledgement that the only way for America to maintain its current eminence is to mobilize the STEM skills of its black and brown minorities. To be specific, the report bluntly acknowledges the significant role that HBCUs can play in increasing the number of African American STEM doctorates.

Following the precedent of a widely cited NSF report a few years ago (see Baccalauareate Origins of Black Doctorates, Aug 2008), the National Academies developed their own tabulation of the colleges where African Americans who earned STEM doctorates between 2002 and 2006 earned their baccalaureate degrees. The "Top Ten" colleges were all HBCUs; moreover, five of the next fifteen colleges were also HBCUs. (Note: the Academies's Top Ten is consistent with, but not identical to the NSF Top Ten.) That's the good news. Now comes the challenge.

If the production of black pre-doctoral candidates were merely a matter of enrollments, then the HBCU (or non-HBCU) having the largest black undergraduate enrollment would always rank first, the college having the second largest enrollment would always rank second, etc, etc, etc. But this is not the case with the Academies' list, nor was it the case with the previous NSF list.

Indeed, it is more instructive for us to identify the colleges that produced the most future black doctorates per thousand black students enrolled in their colleges. Of course, we must also insist on some kind of "minimum" black enrollment; otherwise a college that only enrolled one black student per class whose graduates always obtained doctorates would be at the top of the list ... but wouldn't make much of a contribution to filling the growing national gap in STEM doctorates. However this isn't a concern in the present case because each of the HBCUs on the Academies' Top Ten list has a sizable black enrollment.

Ideally we would calculate the average undergraduate enrollments in each of the Top Ten schools for 8 to 10 years preceding the 2002 to 2006 observation period. Unfortunately, this data was not available to the author of this note. So he used the Fall 2009 enrollments as a plausible estimate of the average relative sizes of the HBCU enrollments.

The next paragraph displays the Academies' Top Ten list with the ranking, name, and number of doctoral alumni in bold on the left side ... followed by the Fall 2009 undergraduate enrollments ... followed by the number of doctoral alums per 1,000 undergrads on the right side, again in bold.

1. FAMU 51, Undergrad = 10,244 ... # per 1,000 undergrads = 4.98
2. Howard 48, Undergrad = 7,176 ... # per 1,000 undergrads = 6.69 {6}
3. Hampton 44, Undergrad = 4,565 ... # per 1,000 undergrads = 9.64 {4}

4. NCA&T 42, Undergrad = 8,955 ... # per 1,000 undergrads = 4.69
5. Spelman 42, Undergrad = 2,229 ... # per 1,000 undergrads = 18.84 {1}
6. Morehouse 35, Undergrad = 2,689 ... # per 1,000 undergrads = 13.01 {2}

7. Southern A&M 33, Undergrad = 6,484 ... # per 1,000 undergrads = 5.09
8. Xavier 32, Undergrad = 4,228 ... # per 1,000 undergrads = 7.57 {5}
9. Tuskegee 31, Undergrad = 2,475 ... # per 1,000 undergrads = 12.52 {3}

10. Morgan 30, Undergrad = 6,199 ... # per 1,000 undergrads = 4.84

Before considering these amended results, the author asks the reader to pause for a moment to acknowledge the achievements of every school on this list. Each and all are credits to themselves, to the HBCU community, and to the nation as a whole.

Now for the numbers. For readers who did not perform a similar analysis of the earlier NSF list, Spelman's preeminence must come as a shock. It is almost fifty percent more productive than the second ranked college and more than three times as productive as the schools at the bottom of this elite list. ... and, oh yes, it's a "girl's school" ... a "girl's school" that is beating the pants off the other schools in STEM, fields in which women are still not expected to be as successful as men. ... Full disclosure requires that the author acknowledges that he is the proud father of two daughters and the proud grandfather of one granddaughter ... :-)

Other observations are not surprising: The top six schools on this Top Ten list are all private colleges, and all six are substantially more productive than the four public HBCUs. Not only is this not surprising, if the results were otherwise, one would have to suspect the validity of the data. None of the public HBCUs is a "flagship" campus in their state systems; hence none are allowed to be anywhere near as "selective" in their admissions as the private HBCUs. Furthermore, the private schools charge tuition and fees that are two to three times as high as the public HBCUs, so parents (and students) should expect, nay demand that they be at least two to three times as productive.

It would be far more instructive (and fairer) to compare the black STEM doctoral productivity of the top public HBCUs with that of the other public colleges in their respective states and to adjust the rankings to take Pell eligibility and students' entering grade point averages and/or SAT scores into account. The author did not make these calculations because he does not have access to the necessary data at this time.

____________________________
Related notes:

The Best HBCU

What If HBCUs Never Existed? -- An Alternative Response

noreply@blogger.com (DrB_2Kxx) — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 15:42:00 +0000

This question has recently been asked and answered in an historical context. With all due respect for the good intentions of the author of that widely read essay, in my opinion neither the question nor an historical response addresses the existential challenge: Why are HBCUs still needed?

A similar question could be asked and answered about family farms. There was a time, prior to the industrialization of farming in the nineteenth century, when over 70 percent of the population was directly engaged in farming. Today less than three percent of us are farmers. Times change.

Railroads provide a more insightful example. Prior to the invention of cars, trucks, and airplanes, railroads transported over 90 percent of the passengers and goods across the continent. Today, railroads still play a vital role in our nation's economy -- not as 19th century monopolies, but as core components of a multimodal, national, transportation infrastructure. Times changed, but fortunately, so did the railroads.

As I stated in my own essay "From HBCUs to BCUs," the existential challenge can only be addressed by identifying new missions for HBCUs that will enable them to continue to play a leadership role for the central issue that inspired their creation in the first place -- providing better higher educational opportunities for African Americans. We know what HBCUs have done in the past, but looking forward, what will they do in the future? More specifically, what will they do that other institutions of higher learning won't do as well, or perhaps, won't do at all?

Almost fifty years after African Americans entered the higher education mainstream, their retention and graduation rates lag far behind their Caucasian and Asian American counterparts. I hesitate to say that integration hasn't worked, but it certainly hasn't worked anywhere near as well as we had hoped. If HBCUs don't play a leadership role in developing new teaching methods that are more effective for all African American students, not just for their own students, but especially for African American males, who will? And if HBCUs don't play a leadership role in developing and implementing solutions to social, economic, and environmental problems that have disproportionately negative impact on African American communities, who will?

________________________________
Related notes:

From HBCUs to BCUs

Crossing the Finish Line at HBCUs

noreply@blogger.com (DrB_2Kxx) — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 14:48:00 +0000

A. Overall Review
I write this note to call my readers' attention to one of the most important books about higher education that I have encountered in the last twenty years. I am referring to a recent publication called Crossing the Finish Line by William G. Bowen, Matthew M. Chingos, and Michael S. McPherson (Princeton University Press, 2009).

I sincerely believe that this book should be read by every president, provost, and chancellor at every college and university in the country. However, I direct my strongest recommendations to the senior administrators at every HBCU that has a two year or a four year undergraduate degree program.

Their book summarizes the most important results of the authors' exhaustive examinations of the factors that are most closely related to the graduation rates of students at 68 public colleges, or to be more specific, at 21 "flagship universities" and at all of the public universities in Maryland, North Carolina, Ohio, and Virginia. Their inclusion of all public institutions in these four states enabled them to to include 11 of the best known public HBCUs in their analysis.

The authors' findings are derived from a sophisticated series of regression analyses of the massive databases that they constructed from the individual records of hundreds of thousands of students in the 68 public institutions in their sample. Although the civil liberties "angel" in me is appalled by their access to the private records of so many students, the educator in me screams: "Shut up! Look at what they learned from the data! Consider how much we can improve our programs by using their findings!"

In my opinion, this important book can be understood by any intelligent reader for two reasons:

First, the authors are very good writers; and

Second, the book only contains the authors' logic, their most important findings, and some superbly constructed bar charts and line graphs that illustrate their findings. They banish the underlying technical discussions of data collection, sampling, variable construction, handling of missing variables, etc, etc, etc to a 150 page appendix published on a Website ...http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/appendix_8971.pdf

Given the massive size of its underlying databases, the rigor of its analysis, and the clarity of its presentations, this book is the fine product of master craftsmen who are showing the rest of us how the grand scale, social science research game is supposed to be played. Although the data underlying their findings only includes student records from public institutions, it seems likely that their findings will be highly relevant to private colleges and universities. The next three sections of this blog present my comments about three of their findings; the last two sections address related issues not covered by their research.

B. Transfer Students From Two-Year Colleges Are Good Investments
The authors found that transfer students from two year colleges are more likely to graduate than freshmen having similar high school GPAs and SAT/ACT scores (p. 142). They offer a plausible explanation of this pattern in their data:

"We believe that these superior graduation rates among transfers (after adjusting for differences in observable credentials and background characteristics) reflect strong selection effects. That is, students who come to four-year institutions from two-year colleges have already successfully managed the transition from high school to one kind of college experience. We strongly suspect that their subsequent success at four-year institutions, compared with the outcomes of first-time freshmen, reflects differences in aspirations, maturity, social capital, and coping skills (including a demonstrated ability to 'stay the course'). The two-year colleges, in short, are a 'sorting mechanism' that works to the benefit of the four-year institutions to which their students transfer." (p. 143)

The data shows that the transfer students in the study's massive sample did better than similar groups of entering freshmen. Therefore the authors' large scale research provides significant support for the recent efforts by a number of four-year HBCUs to establish special relationships with two-year colleges that facilitate the transfer of the two-year students to the four-year HBCUs upon graduation, e.g., Alabama A&M, Fort Valley State, South Carolina State, Cheney, North Carolina A&T, six HBCUs in South Carolina, and Prairie View.

C. Grade Point Averages (GPAs) Are Usually Better Predictors than SAT/ACT Test Scores

Paraphrasing the authors' findings for emphasis: If the test scores for an entering class of freshmen were increased by one standard deviation, the six-year graduation rate for this class would increase by less than 2 percent at all of the universities in the sample, e.g. from 70 percent to less than 72 percent. But if the high school grade point averages of an entering class increased by one standard deviation, the six-year graduation rate for that class would increase by 10 percent at the non-elite universities, e.g., from 70 percent to 80 percent, and by 6 percent at the elite/selective universities, e.g., from 84 percent to 90 percent.

The authors also found that it didn't matter what high schools the students attended. For students from the same high schools, their grades were far better predictors of graduation rates than their test scores.

"The parallel, and even more revealing, finding is that high school GPA is very positively and very consistently associated with six-year graduation rates whatever the level of the high school that the student attended. From the perspective of our interest in predicting the probability that a student will earn a bachelor's degree, the conclusion is straight-forward, with modest qualifications: 'a grade is a grade is a grade.' Students with very good high school grades who attended not-very-strong high schools nonetheless graduated in large numbers from whatever university they attended. On the other hand, students with relatively weak academic records in high school have much lower graduation rates than their higher-achieving high school classmates -- again, whatever the academic level of the high school they attended." (p. 122; italics in authors' text)

The authors interpret their findings as follows:

"Our interpretation of this entire set of findings is a simple one: High school grades are such a powerful predictor of graduation rates in part because they reveal mastery of course content. But the 'in part' formulation is critically important. In our view, high school grades reveal much more than mastery of content. They reveal qualities of motivation and perseverance -- as well as the presence of good study habits and time management skills -- that tell us a great deal about the chances that a student will complete a college program." (p. 124; italics in author's text)

D. Elite Black Students Should Reach for the Stars
Chapter 5 -- " High Schools and 'Undermatching' " -- presents some of the book's most disturbing findings. Whereas conservatives have often lamented that affirmative action would tend to place Black students in colleges that were above their capabilities, i.e., to "overmatch" them, the authors' data demonstrates the opposite phenomenon. The best Black students in their massive sample tended to "undermatch", i.e, to enroll in colleges that were below their capabilities. In the authors' own words:

"Within this highly qualified group of seniors, undermatches appear to have been more common among black students (especially black women) than among white students -- in part because a number of black students undermatched to HBCUs." (p 103)

The authors used the extensive data they obtained from North Carolina to determine that most of the highly qualified Black students never applied to the flagships at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State. Perhaps their most surprising finding was that highly qualified students who undermatched, i.e., chose to attend less challenging colleges, did not do as well as highly qualified students who enrolled in the flagship institutions. The authors pick up this theme again in Chapter 11:

"In other groupings by high school GPA, the pattern is essentially the same -- black male students who went to more selective institutions graduated at higher, not lower, rates than black students in the same GPA interval who went to less selective institutions. Moreover, contrary to what the overmatch or mismatch hypothesis would lead us to expect, the relative graduation rate advantage associated with going to a more selective university was even more pronounced for black men at the lower end of the high school grade distribution than it was for students with better high school records. ... There is certainly no evidence that black men were 'harmed' by going to the more selective universities that chose to admit them. In fact, the evidence available strongly suggests that students in general, including black students, are generally advised to enroll at the most challenging university that will accept them." (p. 109, 110; italics in authors' text)

E. But What About Non-Elite Black Students?
A few months ago, a high level manager of the United Negro College Fund (UNCF) alerted me to a research effort currently in progress that is finding that the HBCUs in North Carolina are doing more than twice as well as other state schools with regards to average Black students, i.e., the non-elite students who do not qualify for entry into the state's flagship universities. If this finding holds up at the end of the study, it will provide an important complement/correction to the book's assertion that non-elite Black students would be better off at elite institutions -- if they were accepted.

Hopefully, the research cited by the UNCF manager will also provide some data-driven insights as to why these particular HBCUs have been so effective in educating average Black students. And could their innovations be adopted by the non-HBCUs in North Carolina and elsewhere? Such findings would support our claims that HBCUs are not only historically important institutions; they deserve America's continued support for years to come because of the significant contributions that they continue to make to American higher education.

(Note: North Carolina has three kinds of colleges: flagships, HBCUs, and other colleges that are neither flagships nor HBCUs. Bowen and associates lumped HBCUs together with the "others"; and perhaps the research cited by the UNCF manager combined flagships with "others". So it's possible that average Black students might be better off at flagships than at "other" colleges, but might not do as well at flagships or "other" colleges as they would at HBCUs.)

F. Institutional Research

When I summarized the book's findings for a colleague, he expressed skepticism because he felt that the advantages of GPAs over test scores as well as some of its other findings would have been discovered by various colleges and universities through periodic examinations of their own data -- if these findings were valid. Exploiting the findings from their self-studies would have given the innovators a competitive advantage over other institutions.

These kinds of self-studies are usually conducted by "Institutional Research" units (or units having similar titles). But when I used the Gateway's comprehensive, Google-based search tool (found on the Gateway's Home Page http://www.dll.org/hbcus) that enables users to search all HBCU Websites simultaneously, I only found 32 Websites that listed Institutional Research units. Most had small staffs; more specifically, they either listed no staff or only listed one or two staff members; and few of the listed staffers had advanced degrees. Therefore I think it is safe to infer that, at this time, the vast majority of HBCUs do not have the kind of staff that would enable them to apply sophisticated, statistical, computer-based analytical techniques to their student records to obtain the kind of findings reported by Dr. Bowen and his associates. (Note:Alabama A& M University is a notable exception --http://www.aamu.edu/irpsp/contact_us.aspx; Xavier University is another --http://www.xula.edu/planningir/contacts.php; and FAMU is a third --http://www.famu.edu/index.cfm?oir&Staff.)

The authors' findings are based on student records from a broad sample of colleges and universities. Although their sample included 11 HBCUs in four states, the validity of these findings cannot automatically be assumed for HBCUs in other states. Indeed, they should also be confirmed by independent analysis of the student records for HBCUs in the four states included in the book's research. These considerations lead me to issue the following challenge to the few HBCUs that have IR units with sufficiently skilled staff:

Please analyze your student records so as to address the most important questions considered by Dr. Bowen and his associates (if you haven't already done so); then share your findings with the entire HBCU community and with interested colleagues at other colleges and universities by publishing them on your Websites.

I will create a portal page on the Gateway to HBCUs that will provide links to all such self-studies in order to make it easier for interested faculty and administrators at other HBCUs and at other colleges and universities to become aware of and gain access to your findings.

____________________
Related notes:

HBCUs as a National Laboratory for U.S. Higher Education

HBCUs vs. FPCUs in the Great Recession

noreply@blogger.com (DrB_2Kxx) — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 18:34:00 +0000

A. Context

This blog continues the discussion begun in a previous blog, "HBCUs in the Great Recession" -- a pessimistic glance at the the negative impact of the Great Recession on the future of the colleges and universities that have provided African Americans with their the most significant opportunities for higher education in times past, i.e., the HBCUs.

It presents some recent data about the positive impact of the Great Recession on the future of the colleges and universities that -- if HBCUs maintain their self-limiting focus on traditional programs -- are likely to provide most African Americans with their most significant opportunities for higher education in the future. I speak, of course, of the FPCUs -- the for-profit colleges and universities.

The vast majority of HBCU programs are still directed at traditional college age students who attend face-to-face classes on weekdays. (See the limited offerings listed in the Gateway's Directory of HBCU Programs for Non-traditional Students.)

By contrast, the vast majority of the programs offered by FPCUs focus on non-traditional students, i.e., older students who must attend classes on evenings and weekends or via distance learning because of their jobs and/or family obligations. Such programs are usually called "adult education" or "continuing education."

B. Substantial African American Enrollments in FPCUs

The reader needs to be aware that a substantial and increasing percentage of the students enrolled in the the nation's leading for-profit colleges are African Americans. The Digital Learning Lab called attention to this trend in a report posted on the Gateway to HBCUs three years ago: Strategic Partnerships (2006).

Back in 2005, when the DLL's staff first assembled the enrollment data for business majors and for information systems majors, two of the most important baccalaureate and masters degrees in today's job market, I used to confound my colleagues by projecting the enrollment tables on a screen while covering up the column that contained the names of the colleges and Universities. Then I would ask them to pick out the HBCUs .. and they would invariably include Strayer, DeVry, and Phoenix. ... :-)

The DLL's Strategic Partnerships report concluded that "a number of for-profit institutions have taken on roles traditionally associated with HBCUs as the producers of disproportionately large percentages of African-American graduates." In other words, FPCUs were eating into what should be part of the core market for HBCUs. Given the fact that continuing education, especially programs involving involving distance learning and/or blended learning, is the fastest growing segment of today's higher education market, the HBCU community has voluntarily excluded itself from its strongest potential growth opportunity.

C. FPCUs in the Great Recession

Whereas most HBCUs have been struggling during the the current massive economic downturn, how did the FPCUs perform? The following table, published in the online edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education on Tuesday 26 August 2009, says it all:

How Enrollment Has Boomed at For-Profit Colleges
	Enrollment, 2009	Enrollment, 2008	Percent Increase

American Public U. System	53,600	35,900	49%
Apollo Group	420,700	345,300	22%
Bridgepoint Education	45,504	22,607	101%
Capella Education	29,281	23,733	23%
Career Education Corp.	93,100	83,300	12%
Corinthian Colleges	86,088	69,211	24%
DeVry	90,365	74,765	21%
Education Management Corp.	112,700	91,600	23%
ITT Educational Services	69,127	54,793	26%
Kaplan Higher Education	103,300	78,700	31%
Strayer U.	46,038	37,733	22%
Note: All data are for quarter ending June 30, except Apollo Group, whose quarter ends May 31. Some numbers are rounded.

While their performance wasn't quite as spectacular as Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan Chase, the FPCUs listed in this table did very, very well. The Chronicle reported that they not only increased their enrollments by the impressive percentages shown in the table, they also increased their tuition revenues and bottom-line profits by comparable margins. In other words, there's lots of money to be made in continuing education -- even during a record-breaking recession.

D. The Digital Divide As A Surmountable Barrier to Opportunity
There are undoubtedly many reasons why the leading FPCUs were so successful, but one is especially relevant to HBCUs:

All of the leading FPCUs make intensive use of information technology (IT) in their administrative operations, in their advisory functions, and in their course delivery systems.

Therefore HBCUs that remain entrenched on the wrong side of the Digital Divide will not become successful participants in the flourishing continuing education market. At this point, information technology is cheap enough to be affordable by most HBCUs. Hence crossing the Divide comes down to hiring competent IT staffs.

Information technology does not configure itself itself. No matter how close it is to the current state-of-the-art, cost-effective IT is always about people. Unfortunately, this obvious "insight" seems to have been missed by the senior administrators of too many HBCUs. Unwilling to hire first-rate (albeit relatively expensive) IT professionals, they try to muddle through with mediocre to inferior, a strategy doomed to costly failure and maddening paradox. A highly talented younger colleague of mine once observed: "The best computer in the world is the one you already have, but aren't using to its full capacity"

It takes first-rate IT talent to specify and maintain the most cost-effective administrative and academic IT systems. Such talent needs to be hired, retained, prized, and paid competitive salaries.

And then there are the IT users: the faculty and administrative staffs. No matter how "user friendly" the information technology, most people need training and retraining -- preferably by competent IT staff -- to become productive IT users.

_____________________________
Related notes:

HBCUs in the Great Recession

The HBCU Community as a National Laboratory for U.S. Higher Education

noreply@blogger.com (DrB_2Kxx) — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 17:13:00 +0000

This blog refines a proposal that was introduced in an earlier blog -- "Why are HBCUs Still Needed? -- Part II"

A. Context

Although continued support for HBCUs is usually justified by references to their historic success in educating African Americans, nowadays eighty percent of African American students attend non-HBCUs. This suggests that their historic justification is a fading argument that may cause us to overlook the potential contributions that HBCUs could make tomorrow, not just to the African American students at HBCUs, but to African American students at non-HBCUs and to all students in the U.S. higher education system -- regardless of their race.

Two of the most important challenges facing HBCUs today also face the non-HBCUs -- fewer male students enroll and they drop out at higher rates than females; and female students enroll in STEM programs (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) at lower rates than males.

The "bad news" is that fewer African American males enroll and they also drop out faster than Caucasian and Asian American males; and the proportion of African American females entering STEM programs is lower than for Caucasian and Asian American females. (Note that the performance of African American students is comparable to that of Latino and Native American students.)

None of this should surprise anyone who is aware of the relative differences in social and economic capital available to most African American, Latino, Native American, Asian American, and Caucasian students because students who have access to more social and economic resources should be expected to be more successful in coping with the challenges of academic life.

The "good news" is that solutions that work for HBCUs may also work for non-HBCUs having substantial African American enrollments, for other minorities at non-HBCUs, and possibly even for the socially and economically more advantaged Asian American and Caucasion students facing similar challenges. In other words, non-HBCUs should pay close attention to the successes and failures of HBCUs because they might learn useful things that could help them provide more productive educational experiences for their own students -- regardless of race.

B. HBCUs as a National Lab

An ideal collection of colleges and universities that would serve as a national laboratory for higher education would be a random sample that controlled for race.

Most HBCUs are still predominantly Black, so one can assume that race and prejudice have minimal impact on their operations. (At least 93 of the 104 HBCUs have Black/non-Hispanic enrollments greater than 50 percent; this data is not available for five HBCUs.)
Although not a random sample, the community of HBCUs is diverse enough for exploratory studies designed to generate insightful hypotheses about education policies and practices. The findings from these exploratory studies could then be proven or disproven by systematic trials conducted at rigorously sampled colleges and universities elsewhere in the U.S. higher education system.

The extraordinary diversity of the HBCU community bears elaboration:

Location -- 22 states, districts, and territories
Types -- 88 four year, 13 two year, and 3 specialized graduate training
Public/Private 4 year -- 40 public, 48 private
Public/Private 2 year -- 11 public, 2 private
Enrollments -- smallest = 100 , largest = 9900 students
Scope -- wide range of programs ranging from vocational training, associates, and bachelors degrees through professional, masters, and Ph.Ds degrees to multimillion dollar NSF/NIH/NASA funded research initiatives

HBCUs in the Great Recession

noreply@blogger.com (DrB_2Kxx) — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 03:53:00 +0000

Like many of readers of this blog, I have spent a lot of time trying to gauge the impact of the Great Recession on the HBCU community:

Although the well-connected bankers at Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase are earning record profits thanks to the generous assistance they received from the Federal government, and although the Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board recently conjectured that the economy would begin to recover by the end of this year, some of the nation's more astute economists have issued strong warnings that the unemployment rate will reach at least 10 percent before it declines. They have also reminded us that unemployment is a lagging indicator of economic recovery because businesses will tend to extend the working hours of their remaining employees before they rehire old employees or hire new employees.

The unemployment rate for African Americans has usually been at least twice as high as the national rate. If anything, the Great Recession has pushed African American unemployment even higher. And as the "last hired, last-rehired", African Americans will be harder pressed to keep up with their children's college tuition payments.
It should also be noted that the recession has drastically reduced the funds available from all sources of financial aid -- except the Federal government.

When the recession suddenly deepened last Fall, these considerations led me to anticipate that HBCUs would be hit harder than non-HBCUs because they enrolled a higher percentage of Black students:

Private HBCUs would suffer enrollment declines as Black students dropped out or transferred to public colleges and universities having substantially lower tuition. This loss of tuition revenue would push some (many? most? all?) of them into a financial crisis. And the longer high unemployment lasted within the African American community, the greater the likelihood that some private HBCUs would have to close their doors permanently.
Public HBCUs might enjoy enrollment increases because of their lower tuition, but their increased tuition revenue might be offset by substantial reductions in their budgets imposed by the governors of their hard pressed states. Furthermore, the longer high unemployment lasted, the greater the existential threat from increased political pressures to merge some public HBCUs with public non-HBCUs or to shut them down entirely. This would come as part of their governor's efforts to reduce size of their state's higher education systems to levels that could be sustained by reduced tax revenues.

Unfortunately, by the beginning of this year some of my pessimistic predictions had already come true. In February, I posted a page on the Gateway (http://www.dll.org/hbcus/Announcements/Recession.asp) containing links to the Web sites of some prominent public and private HBCUs whose senior administrators had courageously acknowledged that they were facing severe financial challenges. And in recent months I have also posted links to announcements from public HBCUs that their Fall 2009 enrollments were at record levels.

Note: this discussion is continued in "HBCUs vs. FPCUs in the Great Recession"

At the Gates of Distraction

noreply@blogger.com (DrB_2Kxx) — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 14:55:00 +0000

In previous blogs I have referred to racism as a "distraction." Of course, it's something far worse than that, but my point is that the perception of racism can distract educated African Americans from achieving their full potential -- even when the impediments presented by racists should be relatively easy to overcome.

I assume that everyone who reads this blog is aware that Harvard professor Henry Louis "Skip" Gates, Jr., was arrested while trying to enter his his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts without a key late at night; and I assume everyone is also aware that the charges against him were subsequently dismissed. Even President Obama commented on this unfortunate incident in a press conference.

I write this blog to suggest that educated African Americans, especially African American males, should not be distracted by this incident. Nobody really believed that President Obama's election in November 2008 banished racism and racists from the land, but neither should anybody have to be reminded that class also matters. Had the eminent Dr. Gates been a high school drop-out instead of a Harvard professor, he would probably still be in jail awaiting trial. Indeed, most of the Black males who languish in disproportionate numbers in the nation's prisons and on death row are the victims of both race and class. I write this blog to suggest that middle class African American males should not confuse themselves into thinking that the distracting racism that we face is the same life-threatening evil that still confronts our less educated brothers.

Let me tell you a couple of personal stories. Correction, let me give you the highlights of one story, but give you the full details of another.

A. What I Didn't Say ...

Way back in the early 1970's when I was a doctoral student at Harvard and living in Cambridge, Mass., I threw a party at which events got out of hand. Let's just say that when the cops knocked at my door at 2 a.m. in the morning in response to a neighbor's complaint, they saw strobe lights blazing, heard Jimi Hendrix blasting from a pair of speakers the size of small refrigerators, and could smell something fragrant in the air. My future flashed before my eyes: I would be arrested and expelled from Harvard. So I put on my most respectful "Stepin Fetchit" and turned down the sound as the cops had requested.

They smiled, left right away, and a few years later I became "Doctor" B. ... :-)

B. What I Did Say ...

Now fast-forward to 2001. When my older daughter called me from Bethesda, Maryland at around 3 p.m. on a Saturday afternoon, I was in my office in Silver Spring, Maryland, deeply engrossed in writing some code for a distributed Web-based application. I told her to leave the car in the parking lot behind the Farmer's Market, and I would pick it up in a couple of hours. I was so engrossed in my coding that when I next looked at the clock it was almost 1 a.m. in the morning. (I was and still am in pretty good shape, so I can still lock in for long hours when the work really gets interesting.) I logged off, ran down to the Red Line Metro, arrived at the Bethesda station around 1:30 a.m., and started walking south on the south-bound side of Wisconsin Avenue.

Suddenly I saw a squad car driving north on the south-bound side of the street at high speed. When I reached the next corner, I was startled when it screeched to halt right in front of me. The cop looked me straight in the face, then made a left and roared down the side street.

Two blocks later, I saw the same squad car again driving towards me on the wrong side of the street. When I reached the corner, he again screeched to a halt in front of me, looked me in the face, then took a left down the side street.

At the next corner I crossed Wisconsin Avenue to get to the parking lot behind the Farmer's Market area. In the daytime, this is a very safe place, with office buildings on two sides and teeming with people. But at night ... I heard a car driving into the parking lot behind me. Guess who? Turning, I could see that, yes, it was the same cop who had been stalking me. The high beams of his car made it difficult to see him when he got out, but I could see him well enough to see that he was not an ordinary cop; he was dressed in black from head to toe and carrying a gun. In other words, he was SWAT-type who was "dressed to kill."

"Sir, would you please come over here. I have to ask you a few questions because you are a suspect in a crime that happened a few moments ago a few blocks away."

Then, from out of nowhere, I heard a sarcastic, angry voice snarling a reply: "What crime am I suspected of committing? WALKING WHILE BLACK?"

I could not believe what I just said. I have never been a smart mouth with cops because I have always known what angry cops could do to me. Where did all that rage come from? I hadn't been drinking. Then a small voice inside my head noted: "It's still here because you're still Black."

As he stepped closer I could see that my situation was worse than I thought. He was not only a White cop, he was a short White cop and I'm a big Black man, and we were in a deserted parking lot. This time the future that flashed before my eyes was far more painful -- He'd beat me to a pulp or perhaps he'd shoot me ... in a deserted parking lot with no witnesses.

But I got lucky. He didn't do anything. He merely clicked a button on the small flashlight attached to his belt and focused its beam on my face. "I have to question you because a cab driver was robbed and beaten by a passenger a few blocks from here and you fit the description of the robber."

"What did the robber look like?"

"He was a tall, African American male in his mid-thirties."

Suddenly, my panic dissolved into giggles at the absurdity of the situation. This cop had looked me in the face twice on Wisconsin Avenue and now had a flashlight shining in my face, the same face that for the previous ten years had prompted obnoxious theater ushers to ask me if I wanted to buy a "Senior Ticket" at the movies. I couldn't believe this was happening, so I protested: "For Christ's sake, man, I'm 60!!!"

He hesitated, then replied: "Can you prove that? Do you have some identification?"

I handed him my driver's license. He looked, and looked again. "Gee, you really are 60. Sorry about that" ... then he shrugged, got back into his squad car, and drove away.

C. The Moral of These Tales

So what can we learn from my experiences? ... and from Skip Gates?

First, we should never, ever let the rage that seethes within us, even into our sixties, reach the surface. And second, the probable consequences of failure to keep that rage bottled up for Dr. Gates and for Dr. B. will usually be far more benign than for our working class and underclass brothers. For us, racism is a distraction that may derail our careers; for them, racism is still a life-threatening evil.

HBCUs in the Computing Clouds

noreply@blogger.com (DrB_2Kxx) — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 20:30:00 +0000

I recently received an email from the CampusEAI Consortium informing me that its list of clients now included the following HBCUs: Spelman College, Hampton University, Tuskegee University, Xavier University, Virginia State University, Florida A&M University, and Albany State University. This represents a considerable expansion of HBCU participation beyond the following announcements that I had previously posted on the Gateway:

CampusEAI Consortium Launches Cloud Computing Services -- Including Albany State myCampus Web 2.0 (March 2009)

ALBANY STATE UNIVERSITY LAUNCHES MYCAMPUS, WEB 2.0 CAMPUS PORTAL (March 2009)

FAMU EIT Receives 1.2 Million Grant Over Five Years from CampusEAI (April 2009)

That some HBCUs would be implementing cloud computing, a/k/a "Software as a Service", a/k/a "SaaS" was to be expected in the context of the unprecedented financial challenges to all HBCUs posed by the current Great Recession. Why? Because cloud computing holds the promise of providing far more cost-effective services for scarce IT dollars than traditional in-house IT services. Among other things, an HBCU doesn't require as large or as skilled an IT staff to manage applications that run "out there" somewhere in the cloud than on the HBCU's own servers.

Unfortunately the record shows that in times past, when faced with cost-effective IT innovations, too many HBCUs have attempted to carry on with their old "business as usual" technologies -- thereby widening the Digital Divide. So I am greatly encouraged by this surge of interest in cloud computing -- which is all the more timely in the context of Google's recent announcement that it will soon produce "Chrome OS", a cloud-based operating system that will directly challenge Microsoft's monopoly on the desktop. Although Microsoft has faced down other cloud-based challengers in the past, none had Google's formidable financial resources nor its talented army of high-tech wizards.

CampusEAI's seven clients have staked leadership positions with respect to one of the most powerful Internet technologies to emerge within the last two decades. As per my previous blog -- Why are HBCUs still needed? Part II -- their diversity demonstrates the capacity of the HBCU community to serve as a national higher education laboratory. Four are private; three are public; they are located in five states; and their enrollments range from around 2,400 to 9,500 students.

At this point, interested bystanders hoping to learn from their experience should be asking themselves: Why did these HBCUs agree to try cloud computing? Which other HBCUs approached by CampusEAI declined to participate and why did they decline? As time goes on, we will also be watching to learn which of these pioneers were successful, which weren't successful, why, and why not?

Why Are HBCUs Still Needed? -- Part II

noreply@blogger.com (DrB_2Kxx) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:40:00 +0000

This is my second blog that addresses this question. My first (June 2009) considered two advantages that HBCUs still offered African American students:

A wider array of African American career role models & mentors than found in most predominantly white universities; and
A wider array of personal role models and more academic freedom to help African American students develop their own personal strategies for coping with the distracting racism that still pervades American society.

This blog considers some of the advantages that HBCUs provide to the communities in which they are located and to the American system of higher education.

A. Economic Benefits of HBCUs to Local Communities

There are only 104 HBCUs, and most of them are relatively small organizations that employ fewer than 3,000 faculty and staff and enroll fewer than 5,000 students. So I wasn't surprised by the October 2006 report from the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) that estimated the "Economic Impact of the Nation's Historically Black Colleges and Universities" as being roughly equivalent to that of the 232nd largest corporation on the Forbes 500 list.

Whereas our biggest banks and our biggest manufacturing firms may be "too big to fail", the same cannot be said for the 232th largest corporation on the Forbes 500 list ... or any other economic entity of comparable size. In other words, their economic impact is not large enough to compel the Federal government to greatly enhance its support for HBCUs during the current Great Recession.

On the other hand, some HBCUs have substantial impact on the economies of their local communities, impacts that should be large enough to compel state and local governments to regard them as worthy of increased support. Consider the following headlines and excerpts from the press releases posted on four HBCU Websites:

FSU a Vital Economic Resource in Greater Fayetteville Region -- July 2007

A study commissioned by FSU Chancellor T.J. Bryan found that Fayetteville State University (FSU) has a total economic output impact of $194.5 million on the Greater Fayetteville region (Cumberland, Harnett, Sampson, Bladen, Robeson, Hoke, and Moore counties).

Savannah State has $128 million economic impact during FY 2007 -- July 2008
Savannah State University’s total impact on the local economy was approximately $128 million during the fiscal year 2007, according to a study conducted by the Selig Center for Economic Growth in the University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business.

Economic Impact Study Shows SUNO Gives Taxpayers More for Their Money -- May 2009
This study highlights the Southern University at New Orleans (SUNO) economic impact for the 2008-09 fiscal year in several critical areas, including spending and contributions of our graduates. The overall impact of SUNO's spending is $111,461,082 on a state budget of just over $16 million. In other words, the State of Louisiana's return on its investment at SUNO is approximately seven-fold. For every dollar invested, the State enjoys a return of approximately $7.
Xavier University Has Significant Impact on New Orleans Economy -- July 2009
A 2008 economic impact study shows that Xavier University of Louisiana is a significant contributor to the metropolitan area's economy. According to the study, Xavier generates more than $320-million in economic activities, and about $115.6-million of that is household earnings in the Greater New Orleans Region.

B. HBCUs as a National Laboratory for Higher Education

Unfortunately, African American students are not doing as well in colleges and universities as White students or Asian American students. For example, African Americans enrolled in traditional baccalaureate programs have lower six year graduation rates. Although many factors contribute to this disparity, one of the most obvious is the persistence of racism in our society.

If HBCUs didn't exist, data-oriented policy makers determined to identify the relative importance of other factors contributing to under-performance by African American students might give serious consideration to establishing a "control group" of colleges and universities wherein the forces of racism could be minimized by specifying that their student body, faculty, and administration would be predominantly Black.

If the colleges and universities in such a "racism-free" laboratory were sufficiently diverse with regards to other important factors, we could gain greater insight as to which teaching and administrative strategies worked better for African American students and why they worked better.
In particular, we could identify strategies that were more effective in improving the retention and performance of African American males; and we could identify strategies that were more effective in encouraging African American females to pursue careers in STEM fields, i.e., in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

Well the good news is that such a laboratory of predominantly African American colleges and universities already exists; but the bad news is that our policy makers haven't had the wit to recognize that the lessons learned from the experiences of the nation's 104 HBCUs that enroll 20 percent of African American students could greatly enhance the effectiveness of the thousands of non-HBCUs in their efforts to provide quality higher education for the other 80 percent.

As I noted in my previous blog, it's time we all recognized that some HBCUs are doing a much better job than others. At this point we should be trying to figure out why. Consider two examples:

Arkansas Baptist College has a 100 percent six year graduation rate. Although this is a very small college (600 students), a number of other small HBCUs graduate less than 30 percent of their students in six years. So why is Arkansas Baptist so successful? What are they doing that's so right? And could their approach be adopted by non-HBCUs?
Spelman College has a 79 percent six year graduation rate, a solid performance that is well above the national average. But what really intrigues me about Spelman is its capacity to inspire its female students to excel in STEM courses -- science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Every year I post headlines on the HBCU Gateway that link to Spelman's press releases about how well its 100 percent female student body performed in international robotics competitions.

More significantly, when the National Science Foundation recently looked into the question of where African Americans who received doctorates in science and engineering obtained their undergraduate degrees, Spelman was ranked second (150 doctorates) behind my employer Howard University (224 doctorates). Yes, Howard was Number One ... but ... it only produced 50 percent more doctorates than Spelman even though its undergraduate enrollment (7,000) is three times as large as Spelman's (2300) ... and one third of Howard's enrollment is male, so we don't know how many of its doctorates were female.

Clearly Howard is doing something right, but whatever that something is, Spelman seems to be doing it much, much better. However the real "winner" in this "competition" could be the thousands of non-HBCUs who sincerely want to inspire their female students to pursue science and engineering careers. They could learn a lot from Spelman ... and from Howard ... :-)

The Best HBCU

noreply@blogger.com (DrB_2Kxx) — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 15:20:00 +0000

There is no such thing as "the best HBCU, the second best HBCU, the third best HBCU, etc"; nor is there such a thing as "the best predominantly White institution (PWI) of higher learning, second best, third best, etc. " Annual "rankings" of colleges and universities are nothing more than mildly entertaining bits of gossip whose primary function is to promote the sales of the magazines in which they appear. They should never be taken seriously.

Unfortunately, when they are taken seriously, these so-called "rankings" can cause prospective students to make very bad career decisions because they distract attention from the real question: Which HBCU is best for YOU? This question has become even more critical in the context of the worst recession since the Great Depression.

Sensible answers must be based on reliable data. Although the available data about America's colleges and universities is not as good as it should be, the Web now provides free access to gigabytes of useful information from reliable sources that can enable prospective students (and/or their supporting families) to quickly narrow their options down to a small handful of feasible possibilities. Nobody should pay any attention to gimmicky "rankings."

A. Sources of Information about HBCUs
Nowadays the most important souces of information about HBCUs are:

The U.S. Department of Education's College Navigator
This Website provides data about all of the accredited colleges and univerisities in the United States, e.g., tuition, estimated costs of books and other materials, male/female composition, racial composition, and six year graduation rates.

The Carnegie 2005 Classifications
This Website enables users to identify colleges and universities that are similar to one another by a variety of measures.

HBCU Websites
Each HBCU now has its own Website that provides background information about the history and the mission of the HBCU, descriptions of its current courses, programs, tuition & fees, and announcements about its most recent achievements and upcoming events.

Personal observation
Once you've narrowed your options down to a few possibilities, there is no substitute for direct observation, i.e., visits to the campus for discussions with faculty, students, and administrators. You should also talk to some of their recent alumni.

Note: The reader is also encouraged to use the Gateway to HBCUs because the primary purpose of this Website is to inform its users about the academic activities of HBCUs, i.e., their teaching, research, and community service. More specifically, its Profiles and its Directories of HBCU Programs for Nontraditional Students and Distance Learning provide direct links to the other Webpages that carry the most relevant information about each HBCU.

B. Traditional vs. Nontraditonal Students

Traditional students attend classes on weekdays, usually between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. By contrast, nontraditional students can only attend classes on evenings, weekends, and via distance learning because of their jobs and/or family obligations. Traditional students tend to be younger (18 to 25), attend classes full-time, and only work only part-time. Nontraditional students are older and attend classes on a part-time basis. Traditional students are usually enrolled in degree programs; many nontraditional students are enrolled in job skills certificate training programs.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of the courses and programs offered by the 104 HBCUs are still geared towards traditional students. For example, most HBCU classes are offered on weekdays.

The latest edition of the Gateway's Directory of HBCU Programs For Nontraditonal Students (currently being updated) only lists 51 HBCUs that offer courses accessible to non-traditional students, and those programs only cover a narrow range of subject matter.

The most selective private HBCUs, e.g., Spelman, Morehouse, and Howard, offer the least number of courses and programs for nontraditional students.

Most of the nontraditional programs are offered by four year public institutions -- e.g, North Carolina A&T, Fayetteville State, and Tennessee State -- and by two year public institutions -- e.g., Trenholm State Technical College, J.F. Drake State Technical College, and Gadsden State Community College.

The Department of Education's Navigator and the Carnegie Classification Websites (as well as the so-called annual magazine "ratings") don't provide much information about programs for nontraditional students; their data focuses on programs for traditional students.

To derive the most benefit from the major sources of information about HBCUs, you have to ask the right questions. Hopefully the following checklists will prove useful.

C. Checklist for Nontraditional Students

1. If you are a nontraditional student, are you seeking a degree?
If you are seeking an associates or a bachelors degree, the number of HBCU options is even smaller. The Gateway's Directory of HBCU Programs for Nontraditional Students only lists 5 HBCUs offering associates degrees for nontraditional students and 19 offering bachelors degrees.

2. If you are a nontraditional student, does the HBCU offer the degree programs or certificate programs in which you are interested?
As noted above, most HBCU programs are still geared towards traditional students. This is one of the reasons why for-profit colleges like the Phoenix, Strayer, Kaplan, and DeVry have been so successful in enrolling African Americans in recent years. They offer far more programs that nontraditional African American students are looking for than do HBCUs.

3. If you are a nontraditional student seeking job skills certificate training, can you afford the HBCU program or do you need financial aid?

Information about the costs of nontraditional certificate programs can be found on the HBCU Websites
The largest and most reliable source of financial aid is the Federal government, especially during the current recession. Federal guidelines do permit the provision of financial aid to nontraditional students enrolled in certificate training programs but, unfortunately, some HBCUs have not organized their certificate programs to meet the Federal requirements. The availability of Federal aid should be indicated on the HBCU Website, but if the Website doesn't explicitly state this availability, you should contact the HBCU to be sure.

D. Checklist for Traditional Students
The remaining questions assume that you are a traditional student seeking an associates or bachelors degree.

1. Which HBCUs are accredited?
Unfortunately, a few HBCUs have recently lost their accreditation and a few more may be in the danger zone. If an HBCU is not listed in the College Navigator, it is not accredited.

Loss of accreditation prevents current students from obtaining additional Federal aid, jeopardizes their chances for admission to graduate/professional schools, and diminishes their employment opportunities. You should also be mindful of reliable reports about scandals and lawsuits involving an HBCU's senior administrators. Most HBCUs are small enough that these kinds of distractions can seriously undermine their efficiency to the point where accreditation may be jeopardized in the future. (Note: Prior to the election of the Obama Administation, loss of accreditation automatically meant loss of official "HBCU status; but not anymore.)

2. Which HBCUs offer the degree programs you want and at what price (tuition, books, and fees)?
The best sources for this information are the course catalogs posted on the HBCU Websites

3. If you are seeking a bachelors degree, of the HBCUs that offer the progams you want, which ones have the best six year graduation rates?

The College Navigator provides this information based on data submitted by the HBCUs themselves. It measures the performance of a recent entering class, specifically, the percentage that graduated within six years after they first enrolled.
On the one hand, there probably isn't much difference between an HBCU with a 69% six year graduation rate and one with a 60% six year rate. On the other hand, there is probably a world of difference in the educational experiences of students at HBCUs with a 100% or 79 % six year graduation rates and those with less than a 34% six year rates. Unfortunately, a discouraging number of HBCUs are graduating less one third of their students within six years. There is no escaping the fact that some HBCUs are doing a far better job than others.

4. If you are seeking an associates degree, of the HBCUs that offer the programs you want, which ones have the best overall two year graduation rates?

Once again the College Navigator provides this information.
Overall two year graduation rates are smaller than the six year rates for four year programs, but once again, these rates should not be taken literally. There probably isn't much difference between HBCUs having 10% overall rates versus HBCUs with 9% graduation rates. But there is probably a significant difference in the educational experiences of students at HBCUs with 32% rates and HBCUs with only 8% rates.

E. Checklist for All Students

Finally, there's the question that should be asked by all students, be they traditional or nontraditional:

Why do you want to attend an HBCU?

In a world that is increasingly diversified through globalization, what benefits would you expect to gain by attending an educational institution that is more segregated than the rest of our society? The author of this editorial suggests two related reasons, which he fully discussed in a previous editorial, why African American students might still want to attend HBCUs. (See Why Are HBCUs Still Needed?)

Attending HBCUs led by competent administrators and manned by qualified faculty exposes African American students to a broader range of career role models than they would find at most predominantly White colleges and universities.
Possessing an extensive roster of career role models, HBCUs can also provide African American students with another important advantage: the academic freedom they need in order to work out their personal strategies for coping with the demeaning and distracting racism that still pervades American society.

Why Are HBCUs Still Needed? -- Part I

noreply@blogger.com (DrB_2Kxx) — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 22:50:00 +0000

A. Context
We are now 55 years from the Supreme Court’s 1954 desegregation decision and 45 years from the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965. As a result of these judicial/legislative landmarks that outlawed de jure segregation and undermined the persistence of de facto segregation, the vast majority of African American students no longer attend HBCUs. So it is fair to ask: why does America still need colleges and universities that continue to have enrollments that are mostly Black, even if this racial imbalance is maintained voluntarily? The United Negro College Fund (UNCF) has provided a widely referenced answer to this question about the continued need for HBCUs on its Website (http://www.uncf.org/members/aboutHBCU.asp). An extensive excerpt appears below:
“While the 105 HBCUs represent just three percent of the nation’s institutions of higher learning, they graduate nearly 20 percent of African Americans who earn undergraduate degrees. … HBCU's are experts at educating African Americans:

HBCUs graduate over 50 percent African American professionals.
HBCUs graduate over 50 percent of African American public school teachers and 70 percent of African American dentists.
50 percent of African Americans who graduate from HBCUs go on to graduate or professional schools.
HBCUs award more than one in three of the degrees held by African Americans in natural sciences.
HBCUs award one-third of the degrees held by African Americans in mathematics.
According to a 2004 McKinsey study, the average graduation rate at many HBCUs is higher than the average graduation rate for African Americans at majority institutions.“

B. A Minimal Standard
The UNCF has been the most successful fund-raiser for African Americans in higher education. Its impressive credentials range from the creation of the highly successful slogan – “A mind is a terrible thing to waste” – to becoming the principal administrator of the Gates Foundation’s billion dollar contribution to minority higher education (http://www.gmsp.org/default.aspx). Given that HBCUs range from two year community colleges to full-scale universities replete with professional degree programs in engineering, medicine, and the law, and Ph.D. programs in the sciences and humanities, the UNCF has implicitly defined a minimal standard that should be attained by all HBCUs. To be specific:

HBCUs should demonstrate significantly greater competence in the education of African American students than majority institutions of higher learning.

Unfortunately, the data in U.S. Department of Education’s College Navigator online database (http://nces.ed.gov/collegenavigator) suggests that many HBCUs do not meet this minimal standard. In May 2009 at least 36 HBCUs out of the 88 HBCUs having four year undergraduate programs graduated less than one-third of their students in six years. As for the McKinsey study, its finding would be compelling if it stated that the overall average graduation rate for Black students at ALL HBCUs was significantly higher than the overall average graduation rate for Black students at ALL non-HBCUs; but it doesn’t say this. In effect it merely recognizes that Spelman’s 81 percent and Howard’s 69 percent six year graduation rates for non-Hispanic Black students are higher than the six year rates at many non-HBCUs.

Much of the UNCF's data is historic, i.e., an accurate reflection of conditions in the long transition between the pre-Civil Rights era, when the vast majority of African American students continued to be educated at HBCUs at both undergraduate and graduate levels, and today. But moving forward, as more and more African American students enroll in majority colleges and universities, it is highly doubtful if these historic trends will persist. Indeed, in a report that I posted on the Gateway a few years ago, I noted that many for-profit colleges and universities were now producing so many Black graduates at the undergraduate and graduate levels as to cast them in a role hitherto played exclusively by HBCUs. (http://www.dll.org/WorkingPapers/Reports/StrategicPartnerships_Apr2006/default.asp)
In the last five years two HBCUs lost their accreditation (Barber-Scotia College and Morris Brown University).

But this is only the tip of the iceberg. As the editor/manager of the Gateway to HBCUs” Website, I have closely monitored HBCU activities for almost fifteen years. For the most part I have refrained from publishing links to the many articles in the higher education media and on the HBCU Websites themselves that reported the continuing administrative turmoil that has engulfed many HBCUs during this period. (Note: I only published a few links to these negative reports on the Gateway because I wanted the Gateway to emphasize the positive academic achievements of HBCUs.)

These persistent management problems suggest that there aren’t enough competent Black administrators to manage all of the nation’s 104 HBCUs. Prior to the Civil Rights Revolution, HBCUs had a monopoly on the best Black talent. Where else could they work? However, it is a bitter irony that in today’s more complex, IT-intensive society, HBCUs require administrators with more talent than in pre-Civil Rights days, but there may be fewer qualified Black administrators available to HBCUs. Given the sorry fact that most HBCUs are chronically underfunded, why should a talented Black administrator work for an HBCU when he or she could receive higher pay, deploy better resources, and help educate a larger number of Black students by working at a non-HBCU? I anticipate that the unprecedented depth of the current recession will cause many HBCUs to close their doors within the next five to ten years; nor is this necessarily a bad thing. The nation does not need HBCUs that cannot meet minimal standards.

C. Role Models and Academic Freedom
The discouraging six year graduation rates of over forty percent of the HBCUs should dispel any notions that HBCUs are inherently better qualified to teach African American students than predominantly White colleges and universities. Leadership skills and subject matter expertise are far more important than the skin color of a college’s administrators and faculty.
But why should an HBCU that has competent administrators and qualified faculty provide a better education for African American students than a non-HBCU having equally competent administrators and equally qualified faculty? Why should skin color make a difference? Should short students go to “historically short colleges and universities”? Should left-handed students go to “historically left-handed colleges and universities”?
If HBCUs only taught “Black” subjects like Black Music, Black Poetry or Black Dance, the advantages of having a predominantly Black faculty would be self-evident. But they don’t. Therefore their schools of engineering, medicine, and law don’t teach “Black Engineering”, “Black Medicine”, or “Black Law”, nor do their departments of economics, physics, mathematics, and chemistry teach “Black Economics”, “Black Physics”, “Black Mathematics”, or “Black Chemistry”. So why should a Black student gain any educational advantage in today’s post-Civil Rights Era by studying these subjects in a predominantly Black environment? Here are my answers:

Attending HBCUs led by competent administrators and manned by qualified faculty exposes African American students to a broader range of career role models than they would find at most predominantly White colleges and universities.

It’s one thing to read about Black chemists, Black physicists, or Black mathematicians in high school classes during Black History Month; it’s quite another to sit in their classes. It’s one thing to read about high level Black managers; it’s quite another to see them up close, making important decisions. The legal restrictions of slavery and segregation may have been abolished, but the capacities of many African American students to take maximum advantage of the opportunities available to them in today’s society are often impeded by self-imposed limits. Few of us are pioneers … or want to be. Most people need to see that others have already gone down lesser-known paths to be sure that passage down such paths is even possible. In other words, many African American students still need African American role models and mentors to inspire them to realize their fullest potential, and the more role models the better.
Possessing an extensive roster of career role models, HBCUs can also provide African American students with another important advantage: the academic freedom they need in order to work out their personal strategies for coping with the demeaning and distracting racism that still pervades American society.

Contrary to the national media, no one speaks for all Black people. There are no "Black Popes". This is commonly accepted at HBCUs, so their students do not engage in mutually destructive "Blacker-than-thou" games. Nor do HBCU professors indulge their students' misperceptions, something that happens all too frequently on predominantly White campuses where liberal professors are guilted into subverting academic standards they had sworn allegiance to all of their adult lives.

Rather than pay their Black students the ultimate courtesy of honest disagreement, they stand mute in the face of the most inane gibberish -- “Gee, I always thought that two plus two was four … but maybe it’s five for Black People“. The existence of a broader range of African American role models among an HBCU’s faculty, staff, and senior administrators exposes African American students to a broader range of coping strategies from which to choose. At HBCUs, African American students -- as well as African American faculty, staff, and senior administrators -- are free to be any shade of Black they want to be. ... :-)

_____________________________ Related notes:

Why are HBCUs still needed? -- Part II

Cyberinfrastructure -- the Digital Divide, Part 2?

noreply@blogger.com (DrB_2Kxx) — Sun, 21 Oct 2007 13:23:00 +0000

Over the course of the last five or six years, the National Science Foundation has synthesized a coherent vision of some the most important emerging developments in science and technology, developments that it is prepared to support as part of its mandate to promote scientific and engineering initiatives that will help the U.S. maintain its position of global leadership. Recalling that the great industrial economies of the past were based on infrastructures that included roads, water, sewer, power grids, telephone systems, etc, NSF views the underpinnings of the emerging knowledge economies as "cyberinfrastructures." NSF's "Cyberinfrastructure Vision for 21st Century Discovery", March 2007, presents its most recent comprehensive description of its vision.

Reading NSF's documents leaves the Editor with a queasy feeling of "deja-vu all over again". Way back in the early 1990's when Vice President Gore was crisscrossing the country waving his arms about the coming "Information Superhighway", the nation's most prominent universities invested heavily in the acquisition of Internet connections, computer labs, LANs, routers, courseware, and most significantly, upgrading the IT skills of their faculties, staffs, and students; unfortunately, HBCUs were slow to get started.

By the end of the 1990's, the so-called "Digital Divide" had become the latest manifestation of economic disadvantage for African Americans and other minorities. HBCUS then made heroic efforts to catch up, creating impressive Websites that proclaimed their acquisition of computer labs, courseware, and Internet savvy. But they failed to realize that technology is primarily about people. Hence they failed to make comparable investments in upgrading the IT skills of their faculty, staff, and students.

So here comes another information revolution. Will HBCUs again be slow to get started? Will they again fail to recognize that new hardware and software and network gear are not enough, that people are the most critical components of the emerging cyberinfrastructure, that HBCUs must also make substantial investments in providing new IT skill sets for their faculty, staff, and students?

The Cognitive Impact of HBCUs

noreply@blogger.com (DrB_2Kxx) — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 15:13:00 +0000

In October of 2006, the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) produced an estimate of the "Economic Impact of the Nation's Historically Black Colleges and Universities" in 2001. NCES estimated the total direct expenditures of HBCUs within their local communities; then they estimated the secondary expenditures that resulted from the direct expenditures. In other words, when HBCUs buy more goods and services from vendors, the vendors, in turn, buy more goods and services from their suppliers; and when HBCUs buy less, the vendors buy less. The estimate of annual direct expenditures by HBCUs was $6.6 billion; the estimate of secondary expenditures was $3.6 billion. The combined $10.2 billion was comparable to the 232nd largest company on the Fortune 500 list.

The good news is that this study provided a timely reminder that HBCUs are valuable economic assets. However, their economic value notwithstanding, HBCUs are primarily academic institutions whose services are essential for communities within a modern knowledge-based society. Therefore what we really need is a comprehensive estimate of the cognitive impact of HBCUs.

HBCUs being academic institutions of higher learning, a far higher percentage of their faculty and staff hold doctorates and other advanced degrees than the employees of banks, oil companies, and other members of the Fortune 500. Indeed, the expertise embodied in these advanced degrees should cause HBCUs to have far greater impact on the cognitive activities of their local communities than other organizations of comparable size. Their impact should be especially significant on the African American segments of these communities.

It might be useful to divide their impact into two components. The first component would address the collective contributions made by the faculty and staff as they implement the formal teaching and community service programs sponsored by their respective HBCUS. The second component would estimate the individual contributions made by the faculty and staff on evenings and weekends as highly educated participants in their community's activities -- PTAs, school boards, Churches, Red Cross, political campaigns, and other volunteer operations. Student contributions should also be included, especially with regards to HBCU community service programs and with regards to the students' individual contributions as volunteers in other community service organizations.

The formalized collective contributions of HBCUs would probably be the easiest to estimate. For example: How many members of the local communities receive college degrees or workforce training certificates from the local HBCUs? How many K-12 teachers receive in-service training through courses run by HBCUs? How many K-12 students attend Upward Bound and other summer programs run by HBCUs? How many K-12 students receive tutoring and mentoring through programs run by HBCUs?

Estimating individual contributions would be more difficult. As members of modern academic institutions, HBCU faculty, staff, and students are probably more literate and more computer savvy than their counterparts from Fortune 500 companies. Hence their contributions to the organization and management of PTAs, school boards, Church activities, Red Cross, political campaigns, etc, should have correspondingly higher value.

Finally, comparing HBCUs to the 232nd corporation on the Fortune 500 list offers small comfort when one considers what might happen if corporation 232 suddenly went bankrupt -- probably nothing. Its disappearance would be an economic blip that the market would shrug off within 48 hours. Hopefully, the development of a comprehensive estimate of the cognitive impact of HBCUs will provide a more compelling answer to the perennial question: Why are HBCUs still important?

HBCU/K-12 Partnerships

noreply@blogger.com (DrB_2Kxx) — Sun, 01 Oct 2006 05:18:00 +0000

Back in March 2006, the Gateway published a link to a report by the American Council on Education with regards to factors that impede African Americans and other minority students in their efforts to obtain bachelors degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). One of the most significant impediments was inadequate high school preparation. Because underrepresentation of minorities in STEM fields is a definitive measure of the Digital Divide, the ACE report was very discouraging.

However, the Gateway's database indicated that many HBCUs were not only aware of this issue, they had already established extensive programs designed to help K-12 schools in their communities improve the quality of their classes and to stimulate the interests of their students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Indeed, judging by the announcements on their Websites, an increasing number of HBCUs have become involved in such partnerships with their K-12 neighbors during the last few years. The scope of these partnerships ranges from Saturday and summertime activities for K-12 students, to training programs for K-12 teachers, to establishing model schools. A few examples culled from the Gateway's recent announcements are listed below:

Jarvis Christian College -- Summer reading program

Jackson State University -- MLI/Bell South Partnership

Howard University -- NASA's FMA Live!

University of the Virgin Islands -- Saturday Science Academies

Jackson State University -- NASA workshops for teachers

Tennessee State University -- Forensic science

Howard University -- Middle School of Mathematics and Science (MS2)

LeMoyne-Owen College -- Hollis F. Price Middle College High School