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A recent post on AmRen caught my attention for more than just the story it told. It was about a white employee of a Historically Black College or University (HBCU) in Missouri and how she won a settlement after filing a discrimination claim. The HBCU in question was Harris-Stowe State University, an institution I hadn’t heard of.
My curiosity led me to do some searching online. I have long been interested in HBCUs, mostly for the same reasons that any AmRen reader would be. This started many years ago when I was attending Florida State University in Tallahassee. I had a part-time job working at a government office, and one of my coworkers, a black woman a little older than myself, was a student at Tallahassee’s other university, Florida Agricultural & Mechanical University (FAMU), an HBCU across town.
I listened many times as she recounted the various grants, scholarships, and other awards that came her way, allowing her to pay for all of her school-related expenses and actually turn a profit. Nice clothes, a new car, jewelry — she had it all, despite working at the same $8-an-hour job that I had. I can still see her shiny, sky-blue Nissan Altima parked in the front row outside the office.
The frustration of listening to her as I juggled a modest budget while receiving no financial aid and getting by on discounted store-brand goods has stayed with me ever since. I am reminded of it when I hear anything about an HBCU, which brings us back to Harris-Stowe State University.
I’ll just let the facts I found online speak for themselves. Here are the broad strokes on this school of just over 1,000 students:
- Harris-Stowe is the alma mater of both “Squad” member and Democratic Missouri representative Cori Bush, and of Kimberly Gardner, a controversial ex-district attorney in St. Louis.
- The school has an open-admissions policy, meaning that everyone who applies is admitted, giving it a 100-percent acceptance rate.
- It reports a graduation rate of 20 percent, but as low as that is, it’s still a bit misleading. That is the school’s eight-year graduation rate. In other words, 20 percent of incoming students graduate within eight years. If this were a commuter school, with lots of part-time students taking evening classes while working and often managing families, that might be understandable, but the school reports that 83 percent of its students are full time.
- The four-year graduation rate for Harris-Stowe — the standard measure usually applied — is 3 percent.
- Seventy-five percent of Harris-Stowe students receive federal loans, and their average debt is about $25,000. Within two years of graduation, about 96 percent of all loans are in some form of forbearance, default, deferment, or delinquency. Only 4 percent of graduates are listed as “making progress.” I could find no statistics for students who leave without graduating.
Clearly, this is not a leading academic institution, and such statistics make you wonder how bad it has to be before a school’s accreditation is threatened. Losing accreditation can be a death blow for universities, particularly private ones, because it makes the students at those schools and the school itself ineligible for federal aid.
You won’t be surprised to learn that even when losing accreditation becomes a possibility, there are so many second chances, warnings, and delayed consequences that only schools that are obvious scams need to fear it. A sampling of schools currently threatened with the loss of accreditation indicates just how bad an institution has to be. Those currently threatened include the American Institute of Alternative Medicine, Selma University, and Saint Augustine’s University (an HBCU in North Carolina).
The truth is that a school needs to work hard to put its accreditation in jeopardy, and being placed on probation is an intermediary step that is supposed to allow them to get their house in order. Despite the low bar for remaining accredited, both of Florida’s HBCUs have ongoing issues with accreditation.
The previously mentioned FAMU in Tallahassee has been wrestling with this more or less constantly for the last 15 years. It was placed on probation in 2007 for various rule violations, most of which resulted from its inability to account for millions of dollars of missing inventory and also for some unapproved contractual arrangements.
FAMU’s nursing school — a separate entity from the main university — was placed on probation in 2018 and again in 2021 because of the low scores its students received on the NCLEX, a nursing certification exam. In the years before the probation, FAMU students had achieved an NCLEX pass rate of about 65 percent. (Nationally, the pass rate for first-time test takers was about 85 percent. For test takers in New Hampshire — where blacks comprise less than 2 percent of the population — the pass rate was 96 percent. Go figure.)
Curiously, after consistently posting pass rates in the mid-60s for years, in spring 2023, FAMU reported a pass rate of almost 97 percent, ending the probation that had threatened the program.
FAMU also has a law school, which has dealt with the same accreditation and probation issues affecting the larger university. In 2013, the American Bar Association conducted a study of the law school that found that about 30 percent of students never finished school or took the bar exam. In 2019, of students who graduated from FAMU Law and took the bar exam, 61 percent of first-time test takers passed. (In 2023, the figure for all first-time test takers nationally was 79 percent.)
Similar issues plague Florida’s other large HBCU, Bethune-Cookman College (BCC) in Daytona Beach. Situated incongruously among the bikers and flip-flops, BCC, despite being a private university, somehow is able to secure generous funding from the legislature in Tallahassee. In 2020, Florida appropriated $17.3 million for the college, which is more than $7,500 for each of its roughly 2,200 students. The money came as the school was facing the prospect of shutting down due to “insurmountable debt and a string of lawsuits.”
In 2019, BCC defaulted on $17.5 million in bonds. During legal proceedings brought by creditors, BCC’s total debt was revealed to be in excess of $113 million — from a school that produces only around 400 graduates a year.
The school was placed on probation in 2018 for failing to meet governance standards and for financial mismanagement. The probation was lifted in 2020. BCC had also been placed on probation for four years in the 1990s.
Why are politicians so committed to throwing good money after bad? Why do more than 75 percent of HBCU students get Pell Grants when the figure for all students nationally is 32 percent? Why are so much money and political clout spent on supporting second- or even third-rate schools that produce only 13 percent of all the undergraduate degrees and 5 percent of all the graduate degrees awarded to blacks anyway? How poorly do schools like FAMU and BCC have to perform before we can question their value? Why does Alabama, for example, need 14 HBCUs to serve its 1.3 million blacks?
These are among the many questions we’re not allowed to ask when it comes to HBCUs and blacks generally. The horrible, almost unbelievable performance we get from institutions that have such a sacred position in the world of American education is one of the great unreported scandals of our time.
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The root cause is the denial of race differences. Add to the denial of individual differences within races.
That leads the the US obsession to graduate everyone from college. This has destroyed many Western school systems.
Correct would be to educate each to his intellectual capacities, her motivations and interests. As in old times.
About HCBU’s, we have to admit that we accept African standards of quality and corruption.
https://4racism.org/swiss-high-schools.html
Average Students need not apply. Swiss High Schools admit only brightest 20%
The tree-tier education system is fairly standard across Europe …
the gymnasium provides the level of general education a US college was
supposed to (oh, and they call it “middle” school 😋).
Unfortunately this violates Blacks´! Sibbyl Rite to da Man´s juju –
see, they literally believe if only they can have da Man´s wimmin
(Webb DooBoys´”the white woman as token of equality”), da Man´s banking,
da Man´s zip code and da Man´s diploma they can be just like da Man and live
it high on the hog.
Thing is, HBCUs were originally a worthy endeavour, allowing marginally
qualified Blacks! (Booker T´s “talented tenth”) as well as the occasional
“diamond in the rough” some serious education; now ordinary universities are
forced to fill their (unconstitutional) quota and skim off all the marginally-qualified
and a host of not-terribly-unqualified Blacks!; the dregs that are left for
the HBCUs would in saner times have been considered too dumb for picking cotton –
that´s not the fault of the institution per se.
And it´s all because of the (rather unbiblical) belief in juju.
You are right that HBCUs now totally miss the point, because all the real universities fall over backwards to admit any negro who can spell his ridiculous name the same way twice, and doesn’t have any felonies on his record. This leaves the HBCUs as admitting the dregs of the dregs, because all the really semi-literate negroes went off to White Girl College, and so they have zero academic reputation except at gunpoint, and zero usefulness in the intellectual world.
The one thing they do offer is, a storage space for negroes to keep them at least somewhat contained during their most boisterous, criminalizing years. If a negro wants to spend eight years in a four year HBCU college, then let ’em do it! They’ll be just as useless after eight years as they would be in four, and the rest of us humans get that much more peace and quiet.
I dunno about the rest of you, but I didn’t give a rat’s ass about bling or about creature comforts in college. I scrubbed toilets and washed dishes and lived in a Big Red One army jacket, and I didn’t give a flying f#ck about material matters — my mind was on arts and sciences, 24/7, lived at the library and the experimental theater, didn’t care about what sort of car I drove, because I didn’t — who has a damn car back then?
It doesn’t take long while working with blacks that one can easily see the differences in cognition. Trying to force the stupid into brainiac positions gives us what we have now.
Why don’t we just let them have basketball and we take science.
“So much of what we muster excitement about in American politics, about which we feel passionate, is based in feeling injured, slighted, left out, wronged.” For the rest of the insightful essay from which this is quoted, “Ending Our Secret Alliance with Victimhood: Toward an Adult Politics,” see http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/03/22/ending-our-secret-alliance-with-victimhood-toward-an-adult-politics/ It’s certainly flawed in some of its solutions but the piece is otherwise refreshingly honest about human motivations common to both “right” and “left” movements.
It is a given that HBCUs will have “accounting problems” where the admin. can’t account for money it received from the state. The admin. will pull the “dumb negro” act and White politicians/legislators will let them get away with it after a “probationary period.” Living in Louisiana I saw it time and time again with Grambling U. and Southern U.
BTW, in Florida, Bethune Cookman is known as Baboon Cookman, LOL!
I wonder if the US obsession to graduate everyone from college has other driving forces more essential than race. I think the main issue is an anti-class mentality. At one time, for the upwardly mobile middle class, college was the strongest marker. Giving everyone a degree (participation trophy) washes this away. The race issue is related to this, but stands alone. The second part of the obsession is a silent recognition that public school has been wrecked (mostly by Affirmative Action) so young people NEED to go the college to learn basic life skills they are supposed to have picked up in public school by 8th grade. Then you have the race card on top as a standalone issue. This is all rolled together with a lot of greed and destructive ideology. What could go wrong?
That may be a side effect. In reality, there has been an explosion in private post secondary educational facilities. Education became a commodity, like bottled water. Life skills aside, that became easier as secondary education, in many places, became “dumbed down” and employers who used to do on the job training off loaded that to private “colleges”. All of that increase in student numbers, both public and private, is needed to offset the cost of the sports teams. Education has become a big business.
It would seem to me that irrespective of the actual quality of the education at places like this, it would be an uphill battle to keep the doors open. Alternative Medicine is not welcome in Big Pharma land. I know many pharmacists who never saw a Big Pharma drug that shouldn’t be sold, despite the high risk of taking it.
The lucky ones among the blacks can also dominate extreme longevity as well.
Yeah, it seems like a good idea to try making the dullest and most problematic part of the US black population more worldly and less crime-prone, at least a little bit. Even those who don’t pass might learn something of value about, say, history or politics or current events or whatever. And perhaps be less likely to get in trouble as well, at least while they still remain in school.
Please, stop with the humor. You cannot force feed a negro to get an education. They have to want it and nearly all would much rather exist on the welfare rolls doing sisters who pump out the niglet for mo money while the male collects his welfare check and sells drugs and steals. Over sixty years, that’s over half a century, has been spent on trying to civilize them to no avail. What makes you believe it will work now…??
Well, a lot of blacks do enroll in HBCUs, sometimes for long periods of time. And I don’t think that they’re generally the best of the best or anything even remotely close to it.
Also, since you’re concerned about welfare, what about making mandatory Norplant (for women) and Vasalgel (for men, in the future) a precondition for welfare access?
Grew up in MS; we have 4 (5?). Alcorn, Miss. Delta, Rust, Jackson St., & one more I can’t remember. They do produce NFL HOF football players, though – Jerry Rice, Steve McNair, Lem Barney, Walter Payton, Jackie Slater and on & on.
A little-known secret about HBCUs…
If you are White, you can get a “full ride” (free scholarship) at just about any HBCU. There is no guarantee as to the quality of education you will receive but if you are able to put up with the likes of “the totally black experience”, a HBCU might be in your future.
Raising the average grade point average of the entire student body is a major reason that HBCUs offer “full ride scholarships” to Whites. It only takes a few Whites within the student body to really push up the grade point average of the institution.
LOL
Blacks are mentally inferior and the evidence is overwhelming.
1. Black-americans come in last in all standardized tests. Asian-americans do fine on all the tests so it’s not due to cultural bias in the tests.
2. Africa is by far the poorest and most backward continent on the planet. All of black africa is now controlled by blacks and has been for decades so it’s not due to racism.
3. No black has ever won a Science Nobel Prize unless you count one in 1979 for the semi-science of economics. They have won many nobels in non-brain fields like Peace and also in Literature so it is not due to racism.
4. Out of 1725 chess grandmasters in the world, only THREE are black.
5. 50 years of affirmative action special treatment and blacks have fallen even further behind. What does that tell you?
It’s only a scandal if you have illusions about blacks.
I’d say it’s about what one should expect.