America needs more college grads: How HBCUs can help
OPINION - We believe federal investment in these kinds of programs could result in 18,000 additional college graduates a year within a decade...
Everybody who cares about getting young people the education they need, and that we as a nation need them to have, cheered yesterday’s announcement by the Obama administration of the latest round of winners in the “Race to the Top” competitive education reform grant program.
Thanks to Race to the Top funding, public school students in nine states and the District of Columbia will graduate from high school far better prepared get the college education they need to launch their careers.So important is college to our national economic strength that President Obama has committed the country to regaining world leadership in the proportion of citizens with college degrees.
But despite the Obama administration’s pledge to increase the number of American college graduates, it has not so far instituted or even proposed an initiative that brings to college education the much needed incentive to innovate that Race to the Top has provided in pre-college education.
The country especially needs innovative ways to help African-American, Hispanic American and other minority students get to and through college. The United States is rapidly becoming a majority-minority country with a majority-minority workforce. Simply put, a large portion of our future teachers, doctors, scientific researchers and political leaders—in fact, a large portion of almost every fast-growing career category—will come from communities of color.
But our national record of graduating minority students—especially minority students from low-income families—lags far behind the national need for minority college graduates. The national college graduation rate for all students is 55.9 percent. The African-American college graduation rate is 23 percent lower, at just 43 percent.
If only there were colleges that were up to the challenge posed by the nation’s needs and president’s ambitious goals—colleges dedicated to the education of low-income African-Americans, colleges that know what it takes to get minority students into college and through college.
In fact, there are more than 100 colleges and universities with exactly that experience and exactly that tradition. They are America’s historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). And as the presidents of UNCF (the United Negro College Fund), which represents the nation’s private HBCUs, and TMCF (the Thurgood Marshall College Fund), which represents our country’s public HBCUs, we are volunteering our networks of colleges to serve as engines of innovation to meet this urgent national need.
UNCF and TMCF are prepared to pledge to the president and the country that America’s HBCUs will produce for the economy 110,000 additional career-ready college graduates by 2020. And we are calling on the nation’s corporations and foundations, and the federal government itself, to invest in these colleges and universities, as they have invested in the preschool-through-high school education. We call on the country to invest in these young people, not just until they turn eighteen, but through college graduation. And we urge the country, starting with the federal government as lead investor, to invest in the economy by supporting the expansion in capacity that will be needed to help meet the president’s goal.
UNCF and TMCF are dedicated to educating African-American students, so this is a matter of the highest priority for us. But it is also a critical issue for anyone concerned with educating these children who have for so long been underserved.
Who would that “anyone” include? It would include anyone who wants to make sure that their children and grandchildren have good teachers. Anyone who expects to be cared for by a doctor or nurse over the next twenty or thirty years. Anyone who hopes researchers discover a treatment for Alzheimer’s disease or AIDS. And anyone who understands how important it is to cultivate the next generation of political and community leaders. In other words: Everyone.
HBCUs enroll nearly 300,000 students—up 64 percent from 1976. HBCUs serve those whose need is greatest—more than 38 percent of their students have family incomes under $25,000. They attract students who are long on aspiration—62 percent of HBCU students are the first in their families to attend college. They attract the best and the brightest: a 2008 National Science Foundation study traced the undergraduate backgrounds of a decade of African-American doctorate recipients in science and engineering, and found that of the ten colleges and universities that produced the most of these future PhDs, the top eight were HBCUs, ahead of great universities like Harvard, Michigan and MIT).
HBCUs also produce household names. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., attended an HBCU; so did Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Oprah Winfrey, U.S. Surgeon General Regina Benjamin, Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, and film star Samuel L. Jackson.
Most important, HBCUs produce college graduates. While HBCUs represent approximately 4 percent of all 4-year public and private not-for-profit institutions, they enroll roughly 21 percent of all African-American students, and produce approximately 21 percent of all bachelor’s degrees awarded to African-Americans.
President Obama has made education a keystone issue—”the economic issue of our time,” he called it, in a recent speech at the University of Texas at Austin. The country cannot afford to let the cost of college force students to abandon their education, the president said. “I’m absolutely committed to making sure that here in America, nobody is denied a college education, nobody is denied a chance to pursue their dreams, nobody is denied a chance to make the most of their lives just because they can’t afford it.” The U.S. needs “to open the doors of college to more Americans” the President said, and “we need to make sure they stick with it through graduation. That is critical.”
Clearly, HBCUs represent an asset for American education. And we hope that the administration and the nation’s corporations and foundations will do what every smart organization does with an asset: Invest in it.
The signals from the president and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan are encouraging. Indeed, the administration has continued existing funding for HBCUs under the Higher Education Act and, in fact, proposed increased funding levels for various HBCU programs in 2011, including the strengthening HBCU program at the Department of Education. And administration programs like the Race to the Top and Investing in Innovation programs will contribute to filling the pipeline that leads to college with college-ready high school graduates.
But President Obama and Secretary Duncan clearly envision a larger role and larger results from HBCUs. Regarding how the nation will meet the president’s goals for increasing the number of college graduates by 2020, Duncan said in a recent speech, “HBCUs will—and absolutely must—play a critical leadership role in meeting this challenge.”
We are ready to play that larger role and produce those larger results. We see the potential for building educational capacity at HBCUs—enabling them to give more students a better education. We see potential for forming regional alliances of HBCUs to expand cutting-edge course offerings to more students and to realize economies of scale. Secretary Duncan recognized the potential of such partnerships when he cited a consortium of Texas HBCUs that, working together, were able to reduce low-income students’ default rates on college loans. We see the potential in unleashing the power of regional, national, and specialty-based networks of HBCUs, creating centers of excellence, and offering shared services. And that’s just the beginning.
We believe federal investment in these kinds of programs could result in 18,000 additional college graduates a year within a decade, a total of 110,000 more of those career-ready teachers, doctors, researchers and civic leaders our country so desperately needs.
America’s HBCUs are not looking for handouts or bailouts. Just as this administration has invested in innovation preschool-through-high school education with Race to the Top and other initiatives, our nation’s HBCUs are looking for the country to invest in college education, and they are committed to showing a return on that investment. Not only will our nation’s corporations financially profit from such an investment, but all of America will benefit by reclaiming our international leadership in education.
America’s HBCUs have been serving the country for more than 150 years. We believe more than ever before America needs what our schools know how to do. We are ready to innovate. And, as always, we are ready to serve.
”Be sure to check out what’s going on at EducationNation.com”:http://www.educationnation.com//
