From today's NYT:
IN a classroom of white walls and black students, an air-conditioned sanctuary from a sweltering July morning, Devon Moore walked toward the front table with his homework. He had clipped out a newspaper article and now gave a one-sentence synopsis of its subject, safety problems in pickup trucks. He identified a word new to him, "adjacent," and a word that used a prefix or suffix, "faulty." He was less than four weeks from starting his freshman year of college.Devon had passed up a senior-class trip to Atlanta to enroll in the Summer Academy at Texas Southern University here, and at the outset of the eight-week session, he had wondered why. Having graduated from high school, he figured, "I already knew everything there was to learn." That illusion crashed and burned on Day 1, when the math instructor taught a lesson on slope and even gave an overnight assignment.
For some 185 incoming freshmen like him, and indeed for Texas Southern as an institution, the summer courses in reading, writing, and math form one front in a battle to reverse a disturbingly low graduation rate. Of the students who received diplomas last May, only 6 percent had earned their degree in the normal four years, and only 21 percent in six years. Those numbers, incredibly, reflected improvement from prior rates.
Highlights of the Times article include the contrast of endowments between TSU and Rice (home of the Baker Institute (named for James A. Baker III, my fellow HS alum). Rice has a $3 billion endowment...TSU has a $6 million endowment. Arguably, it's an apples and oranges conversation that goes far beyond "black and white." Rice is an elite institution (ranked along with the Duke's, Emory's, and Vanderbilt's of the south). It's not clear to me that TSU occupies a similar place among HBCU's even with graduates like Mickey Leland and Barbara Jordan.
A second point of interest is that the TSU School of Communications is named after Tavis Smiley following his $1 million donation to the school. The article has some interesting items in it...the author quotes Dr. Jacqueline Fleming, formerly of Columbia University (a researcher who conducted empirical analyses of the impacts on learning for black folk in majority white institutions), who has moved to TSU to lead their student retention programs. Good stuff.
Posted by: Temple3 at August 9, 2005 08:32 AM
Economics is the key.
Most Blacks rely on student loans and grants to attend school.
Posted by: DarkStar at August 6, 2005 05:41 PM