But What About the Other 91 Percent???

The following quote from a page on the Website of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund (TMCF) contains a succinct version of the most widely cited justification for the continued existence of HBCUs:

"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. In addition, the institutions graduate more than 50 percent of African American professionals and public school teachers.

Seven HBCU Strategies for Survival and Success

Impending Collapse

Like other members of the HBCU community, I have been concerned for many years about the long-term survival of HBCUs. My obsession with this question has been expressed in four notes on this blog titled, "Why Are HBCUs Still Needed?" (Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV) and related notes ("From HBCUs to BCUs", "HBCUs as a National Laboratory", etc).  But in recent months my thinking has returned to its engineering roots. Being needed is not sufficient to ensure the survival of any institutions under any circumstances. So my question has become, "What should HBCUs do to survive the impending flood of IT innovations in higher education that will overwhelm so many non-HBCUs?"

A Black Student is a Black Student is a Black Student

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 would inevitably become the most eminent leaders of the black community.