Wednesday, August 03, 2005
Crises In Black Colleges
A half-century after Brown v. Board of Education, 40 years after Lyndon Johnson's speech endorsing the concept of affirmative action, and two years after the Supreme Court upheld racial diversity as a factor in admissions, the approximately 80 historically black colleges and universities still enroll more than 10 percent of the African-American students in higher education and award close to 20 percent of degrees.What's going on here?
So now we see the connection between this post and that of yesterday's. Minority students attend inadequate primary and secondary schools who all share one depressing characteristic: social promotion. Then they send these kids off into a society that says that you must have a college degree to succeed in life but are grossly unprepared to earn a 4 year degree. Again, where's the outrage?What pushed the six-year graduation rate nearly into single digits earlier this decade were factors, both educational and financial, that affect scores of black institutions nationwide. With the desegregation of colleges and universities in the South and the increased recruiting of black students by top universities, what W. E. B. DuBois famously called the "talented tenth" no longer heads to places like Texas Southern by default. In fact, the top 10 percent of graduates from any Texas high school are guaranteed admission to the state university system.
As a result, the students who come to Texas Southern arrive less prepared and sometimes less committed than their forebears. Roughly one-third of them require remedial classes before they can enter college-level courses. More than 100 of the available spaces in the Summer Academy went unclaimed, even though the program charges no tuition and provides a stipend for books that is worth several hundred dollars.
PermaLink | 4:21 AM |
| 
