Consider This from NPR - High profile grads and a yearning for respite have helped boost HBCU applications

Episode Date: August 13, 2022

At one point, over 90% of African Americans with a college degree obtained it from an HBCU. But in the decades following the legal dismantling of segregation, enrollment declined at HBCUs.Recently, some HBCUs have seen a significant rise in applications. The boost could be due to more funding, celebrity students, or famous HBCU grads like Vice President Kamala Harris. But informal conversations with Black students and their families point to something even more powerful: HBCUs are a safe and nurturing space to learn in a time of increasing anti-Black racism.Host Michel Martin speaks with Walter Kimbrough, the past president of two historically Black institutions - Philander Smith College and Dillard University - and the interim executive director of the Black Men's Research Institute at Morehouse College. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR and the following message come from the Kauffman Foundation, providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, regardless of race, gender, or geography. Kauffman.org I had a class, and we were on Zoom. So I had my computer and I had my iPad next to each other. And I hope my professor doesn't hear this, but I was not listening because I muted the class because I could not miss this historic moment. That is Paulina Weber talking about the moment when Kamala Harris was sworn in as vice president of the United States.

I, Kamala J.B. Harris, solemnly swear. That I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States. I, Kamala Davie Harris, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States. That I will support and defend. I just sat there and I cried and I just took in the moment. Weber is a young Black woman, but her joy wasn't just over the fact that Harris is the first Black woman to become vice president. They have something else in common. Harris attended and graduated from Howard, a historically black university. This year, Weber will be a senior at Dillard University, another historically black institution. There's a certain level of pride that comes from that.

Because when you look at the vice president of the United States of America, an HBCU product, and you're sitting in a classroom in an HBCU, it's like, well, what in this world can't I do? Historically, Black colleges and universities, or HBCUs, began in the 1800s to offer Black Americans a place for higher education in a country that, by law or custom or both in many places barred black people from access to schooling. As of 2020, federal data says there are 101 such institutions. They are a source of pride for many black students and their families, a place where more than 70% of the students

share their identity and life experiences. For Weber, being a Dillard is about more than an education. There's a saying about you have the rest of your life to be a minority. So for the time being, you know, be a part of the majority. And I think our shared experiences as Black people and people of color, HBCUs, we understand the world. And when we step outside of our campuses, we know how to navigate it because we are prepared. At one point, more than 90 percent of African Americans with a college degree obtained it from an HBCU.

But in the decades after segregation was legally dismantled, attendance at HBCUs declined, as they struggled with funding and the upkeep of older facilities. Students who would have had little choice but to attend an HBCU took advantage of the option to attend historically white institutions. And then came another blow, COVID, when families and institutions across the country were hammered with difficult decisions around safety, health, and maintaining operations. New figures show that the number of Black students in higher education dropped during the pandemic. Dillard University, for example, where Paulina Weber attends, saw a 37 percent decline in applications in 2020. She worried about how schools like hers would be affected, if they would even survive.

But then something shifted. When COVID first hit, I was afraid for HBCUs. And then we saw the. Morgan State University in Baltimore, for example, reported a 58% increase in undergraduate applications in 2021 compared to 2019, an historic high. There are different theories about why this is happening. Some of these institutions have finally negotiated long-sought improvements in public funding, a correction to historic inequalities. Some high-profile private donors are taking notice of HBCUs, and so are celebrities who are sending dollars, artistic projects, not to mention their children, their way. But informal conversations with Black students and their families point to something even more powerful, that HBCUs are now seen as a safe and nurturing space to learn in what has felt like a growing climate

of anti-Black racism. It's changing the way they think about college and the kind of experience they want to have. They were founded because Black people weren't wanted elsewhere, and they were hungering for an education, and they wanted to move up in society. And when you think about like our ancestors, they attended HBCUs because they had to. And to see students like me and my peers were choosing HBCUs because we want to. And I think that that says something within itself. And it's just a proud moment. Consider this. Along with an education, Black colleges and universities have always provided students with cultural acceptance and a respite from anti-Black racism. But as applications to HBCUs increase,

will graduating students be prepared to face the real world? That's coming up. From NPR, I'm Michelle Martin. It is Saturday, August 13th. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today, or or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. So from the time he was three or four, all we spoke was Morehouse.

That's Sherelle McKeithen-Green, and she's talking about her son, Gideon Green. I got a sweatshirt made that says, Future Morehouse College Graduate at the age of three. And whenever anyone would ask Gideon what college you're going to, he would say Moe House because he couldn't pronounce Morehouse. From the time he was old enough to understand, McKeith and Green said she let her son know the importance of getting a higher education.

Her older godbrother had graduated from Morehouse College to become a leader in business and the community, and she wanted the same success and respect for her son. Gideon chose only to apply to HBCUs. When he was accepted to Morehouse, she was overjoyed. I felt that after he graduated from college, he would have time to be a minority. But at Morehouse, he would be a majority. At Morehouse, he would be accepted. He needed to be around people that were going to protect him, that had his best interests at heart,

and would also tell him that you're going to be great, you're going to be a success. Part of the reason McKeith and Green says she felt so strongly about that were some of her son's earliest experiences in school. At a Catholic school he attended, she came to believe that the administration and teachers were not assessing Gideon fairly. In first grade, the school paired him with a speech therapist, placed him in remedial reading and math, and wanted him held back. She convinced them to let him advance, but during second grade, they recommended adding special education classes for her son. So I listened and I said to the principal, well, I'll have him evaluated, but I'm not going to have him evaluated in the school because I'm not going to leave a paper trail that you'll keep coming to me every school

year with something else. McKeith and Green says the independent evaluation did not find the same problems. I told the principal this will be the last conversation we have about my son and this will be the last year that he will be here. He will be going to another school. And she wanted to know why. I said, because all too often, you want to put a label on boys of color. Gideon's new school was more diverse. And McKeith and Green says that was important to help Gideon thrive. Administration was of color. The teachers were of color. Gideon was accepted into the school for third grade. From third grade to ninth grade, never had another problem about speech therapy, remedial reading, remedial math. He was actually advancing in the school. That kind of diversity is also what she

wanted to see in Gideon's college. She said with teachers and staff who share a cultural background, there's a lot more that is just understood. Last semester, his grandmother who helped raise him was fell. She broke her hip and now is in the nursing home. So Gideon is right now going through some things. And I'm hoping that when he goes to a teacher and explains, she will understand because in our community, a lot of the grandparents have helped raise their grandkids. You might not get that at Georgetown or some of the other colleges. So they understand how close a child can be to their grandparents, how if a grandparent is admitted to a nursing home, how we could affect that grandchild. HBCUs are not perfect, to be sure. Some schools have faced criticism and even on-campus demonstrations in response to what students describe as insufficient or substandard housing and dysfunctional or unresponsive administration. And while McKeith and Green acknowledges that there have been problems,

the facilities, for example, are not as new or well-maintained as she thinks they might be at a predominantly white institution or PWI, she feels that she and her son have been able to work through those problems and feel supported in a way that they don't think would have been possible at a predominantly white institution. I did honestly run into some of the frustrations when we first applied to the college. I wasn't receiving enough funds to finance his first semester there. So I had to make many phone calls to the financial aid department. It was frustrating trying to make these calls. But I eventually made the calls and I made my plea.

I'm a single mother. I'm running the house by myself. I look good on paper. I'm making a lot of money. But look, I'm financing this all by myself. Can you please help me? They heard my cry and they did give me some money to help with his first semester. I don't know if that would happen at a PWI. Does rising interest in

HBCUs signal a welcome renaissance for these institutions or a troubling indicator of rising anti-Black racism? That's coming up. I think that if you look at the advent, it really was just that first opportunity to have higher education. And people realize that if we're going to be able to do well in this nation and be able to compete, we have to have an education. So I think that was very important. Walter Kimbrough has a long history of leadership at HBCUs. He was president of Philander Smith College from 2004 to 2012 and president of Dillard University for 10 years until this year. Now he'll be heading the Black Men's Research Institute at another historically black institution, Morehouse College. We spoke with him about the legacy of HBCUs and their

enduring importance. And early on, HBCUs were the critical providers of Black professionals, and particularly your teachers, your doctors, your lawyers, your ministers. They came out of that HBCU tradition. So that was very important. So prior to the, you know, I guess in the early 1960s, any African Americans who had a degree, about 95% of them went to HBCUs because pretty much those were your only options. People had a high regard for HBCUs for most of the history. I think then when people had a chance to go to different types of institutions, people said, well, we don't have to have those institutions anymore. So it dropped from about 95% to maybe about, I guess, five years or six years ago, I think the low point was about eight percent. So there was a mass drop off eight percent. You wrote an op-ed in 2016

in the Washington Post about something you called the Missouri effect. So tell me about this Missouri effect. Right. So in the fall of 2015, there was a national story about Black students at the University of Missouri that protested just their conditions on campus, how they were being treated to African-Americans. They got everybody to rally. Even the football team rallied and said, unless there are major changes, we aren't going to play. So the chancellor of that system and the president of that campus both resigned as a part of that. And then over the course of the next year, going into 2016, you saw black students all across the country saying we want more black faculty and staff and, you know, more black studies courses, all those kinds of things. So people were having those kinds of questions and answering that.

And people were saying, why are we trying to recreate everything when HBCUs were created to do these things? They provide you with the role models that you're looking for. They provide you with the curriculum that you're looking for. And so I started to see more interest and more stories of people from HBCUs saying, hey, we're seeing some growth. Now, over the past 12 years, there's been a decline every year in terms of people who are going to higher education. So there are still fewer students at HBCUs now than there were in 2015. But when I looked at the numbers, the latest numbers we have are from 2020. All of higher education contracted at about 5 percent.

HBCUs contracted at 4.8 percent. So a little bit less. But the big issue is that Black students from 2015 to 2020 dropped 11%. So the largest group from where HBCUs draw from dropped a great deal, and yet HBCUs didn't drop as much. So that means there were fewer Black students who were going to higher education, but more were saying, if I am going, I'm going to an HBCU. And that's why we start to see the percentage of Black students going to HBCUs start to take back up. Some are calling this a renaissance for HBCUs. Do you agree with that? Do you think that's true?

I do. And like I said, I mean, it's popular culture is, you know, Beyonce with the HBCU theme, Coachella performance. It's the vice president of the United States. It's Raphael Warnock being the first black senator from Georgia. It's Stacey Abrams, who's galvanized voting all across the country. It's post-George Floyd, and people are talking about issues of race. They're reading Ibram Kendi, who is an HBCU grad, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, who's an HBCU grad. You're seeing, you know, HBCU leaders take over at MSNBC. And so you're seeing it all over the place in ways we had not seen it before. Is this renaissance, if we can use that term, is that across the board, or is that at the most high-profile institutions like Morehouse, like Spelman, like Howard?

It's been uneven. It has been uneven. So there are still some HBCUs that people don't know anything about, that don't get the same kind of airtime, if you will. And so those institutions are still trying to figure out, how do we ride this wave? Is it bittersweet in a way that a rise in what I think many young people, many people experience as a rise of anti-Black racism contributing to this interest in, renewed interest in HBCUs? I mean, you hear anecdotally that it's what kids are leaving as well as what they're going toward. On the one hand, they're saying, yes, I have renewed appreciation for the opportunity that this particular kind of institution affords me at this stage of my life.

On the other hand, what you also hear are people saying, I am tired of the reports that I'm hearing from, say, older siblings or what I'm seeing in the news of hostile educational environments, of people being disrespectful to me. You know what I mean? How are you thinking about all that? You know, I grew up in Atlanta, so I went to Atlanta public schools. We're 99% Black, so I was in all Black spaces my entire time. Both of my kids are in schools where at least my son, he was in the great minority for most of his education. And my son's school last year, they had a racial incident and he was in the seventh grade. And so they're seeing enough of that. They're just like, I don't want to deal with it. The parents want them to feel safe. And

so that becomes, as people talk about safe spaces, HBCUs become that for a lot of those students. So you have students at, you know, predominantly white institutions who are trying to create that. And I think if that institution wasn't really created for you, there's only going to be so much that they can do. These HBCUs were created with you in mind. So if that is a priority for you, then this is where you should be. So I think they're just, students and parents are tired of it. And so I think they value being in that space at HBCUs. But I think there is that component to say, I don't want to deal with this stuff anymore. There are those who might argue that that sort of creates a false picture of the world. That is it really to the benefit of black students to be in an environment that is unlikely to be like their

professional environments that they're in unless they're in certain spaces. What do you say to that? We're looking at the broader world. The United States doesn't look like the real world. So, I mean, we're going to talk about the world. We don't look like that either. So, you know, I think that there is some value in being at HBCU because I think there's a greater level of diversity that people don't always appreciate. And they just feel like, well, most of your student body is black. It's like, yeah, but look at the faculty. The faculty is a much more diverse. And I think there are some other skills that people learn in terms of dealing with different people that I think are available. You can't avoid it. But then I don't think you go to that place that's in the middle of the cornfields in Iowa and ask for all these black faculty and all these black things when that's not what it was created for and that's unrealistic. So I just tell people to have a realistic

expectation if you go to a place like that and value it for what it is. And if these other things are very important to you, you need to look at an HBCU. That was Walter Kimbrough, the past president of two historically black institutions, Philander Smith College and Dillard University. He's the incoming interim executive director of the Black Men's Research Institute at Morehouse College. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Michelle Martin.