Stokely Carmichael, national head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee speaks from the hood of an automobile on the campus of Florida A&M University, April 16, 1967, in Tallahassee, Florida. Several hundred students listened as Carmichael spoke of “Black Power” and the Vietnam war. (AP Photo/stf)

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(Pictured below: Members of the Yale University African Students’ Association. Yale is ranked #4 on the Forbes list of colleges that have produced the greatest number of billionaires)

“I am not impressed by the Ivy League establishments. Of course they graduate the best – it’s all they’ll take, leaving to others the problem of educating the country. They will give you an education the way the banks will give you money – provided you can prove to their satisfaction that you don’t need it.” ~Peter DeVries

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Earlier last week, Forbes Magazine published it’s list of those colleges that have achieved the dubious distinction of producing the greatest number of billionaires. They are, in order of billionaires produced:

1. Harvard University (50 billionaires)

2. Stanford University (30)

3. The University of Pennsylvania (27)

4. Yale University (19)

5. Columbia University (15)

6. Princeton University (13)

7. New York University and The University of Chicago (tied at 10 billionaires each)

9. Cornell University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Northwestern University; University of California, Berkeley; University of California, Los Angeles; University of Southern California (tied at 9 billionaires each)

If the accumulation of massive net worth can be considered a measure of success and if one’s success can be even partially attributed to one’s college education, then it will probably come as no surprise that five of the top six colleges that made the Forbes list belong to the Ivy League, that storied sisterhood of impossibly selective, shamelessly well-endowed private universities.

So, what is it about these schools that causes them to produce such unusual numbers of extremely — even excessively — wealthy people? Have the colleges and universities of the Ivy League, most of which are as much as 100 years older than most of their oldest non-Ivy counterparts, simply had more time to hone and perfect the fine art of educating America’s youth? Do their outsized endowments draw the some of best teachers, stock many of the largest and most complete libraries, and provide for the richest array of educational resources and student support services? The answer to both of these questions is, with some qualifications, largely true.

But can the ability to produce many of the nation’s highest earners be simply attributed to the resources (faculty, library volumes, advising and support services) that an institution has to offer. Maybe it is simply that the combination of all of these resources and assets draws a population of students already poised to move into positions of power and wealth. Peter DeVries, author of the quote that begins this post, would agree with this conclusion. He is unimpressed by the Ivy League’s capacity to educate, largely because he believes isn’t that hard to educate students who are already — through happenstance of birth (a.k.a. luck), talent, aptitude, or due to the strength of their high school educations — poised excel at the college level.

If we are to follow DeVries’s line of reasoning, then the institutions most deserving of praise are those which successfully educate students from a wide range of backgrounds and a variety of levels of preparation. I suppose the question can be posed this way: which is the better teaching institution, the one that teaches calculus to students who scored 700 or above on the math SAT, or the one whose programs and support systems successfully create mathematicians out of students who enter with only remedial coursework in that field.

This analysis of the relationship between student preparedness and the effectiveness of a given college’s curriculum and academic and personal support programs would position HBCUs high among the strongest and most valuable teaching institutions in the country. The greatest strength of the HBCUs is their faith in and ability to effectively educate even those students whow enter college underprepared and/or from school districts in crisis.

Posted by Ajuan Mance

You can read the entire text of the Forbes article, “The Billionaire Universities,” at THIS link.

Georgia Tech engineering grad celebrates commencement.

The June 5, 2008 bulletin of the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education reports:

According to the U.S. Department of Education, in the year 2006 blacks earned 142,420 four-year bachelor’s degrees from American colleges and universities. The number of blacks earning bachelor’s degrees was up more than 4 percent from the previous year, 2005. In 2006 the number of African Americans earning bachelor’s degrees was the highest in this nation’s history. The figure was more than double the number of bachelor’s degrees earned by blacks in 1990.

Blacks are now nearly 12 percent of total enrollments in higher education, but in the 2006 academic year they earned only 9.6 percent of all bachelor’s degrees awarded. But note that this figure also measures considerable progress. As recently as 1985, blacks, who were then about 11.5 percent of the population, earned only 5.9 percent of all bachelor’s degrees awarded in the United States.

At a time when our historical perspective on Black progress is often warped by the dearth of coverage of any coverage of African American achievement, the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education gives us a much needed dose of perspective. This report by the JBHE gives us many important reasons to feel both proud and optimistic about African American educational attainment. Consider:

• In only 16 years (1990 to 2006) the number of Black people earning bachelor’s degrees in the U.S. actually doubled! If the number of Black bachelor’s degree recipients continues to rise at the current rate, then by 2022 we can expect the Black proportion of all bachelor’s degrees earned to have oustripped the proportion of Black people in the U.S. the population. In short, Black people will likely be earning undergraduate degrees at a disproportionately high rate.
• The Black rate of enrollment in U.S. colleges and universities is nearly equal to our proportion of the U.S. population. This means that young Black college aspirants should no longer believe that college is an unrealistic goal. We make up just over 12 percent of the U.S. population, and we make up 12 percent of the population of U.S. college students.
• More than 140,000 Black college graduates enter U.S. graduate schools and the workforce every year!

More than anything else, the JBHE reports demonstrates that Black people need neither the acknowledgement or affirmation of the mainstream media or the white majority in order to make educational strides that are in our best interest. Even as the newsmedia, the movie industry, and other purveyors of Black images are doing their level best to reinforce the notion that education, intellectual curiosity, and academic achievement are antithetical to Blackness, African Americans are pursuing their academic goals and dreams in opposition to all prevailing stereotypes. Unable to look to television or the popular press for role models, Black people are finding them in their own families or communities and/or locating the motivation and courage to pursue higher education within themselves.

This brings me to the greatest reason to be optimistic based on the JBHE report:

• This monumental increase in Black college graduation rates has taken place during the very same period in which affirmative action has come under attack across the country, including a spate of state-wide propositions that eliminated affirmative action at colleges and universities in many states with high Black populations.

To Black students past, present, and future, congratulations and keep on keeping on!

Posted by Ajuan Mance

Thomas A. Johnson, pictured in the Times newsroom in 1977 [Source: The New York Times].

Thomas A. Johnson was born in St. Augustine, Florida on October 11, 1928. He died at the New York State Veterans Home in St. Albans, Queens on June 2, 2008.

Johnson served in Japan for three years during the Korean war. He graduated from Long Island University with a bachelor’s degree in journalism in 1954. Johnson initially found it difficult to find work in his chosen field. In 1963, however, he became the first Black journalist at Long Island’s Newsday daily. You can read Newsday’s obituary for Johnson at THIS LINK.

In February of 1966 Johnson joined the staff of the New York Times, where he became the first Black reporter in the paper’s 100-year history. In this paper’s obituary for the history-making journalist, reporter Douglas Martin describes Johnson’s career at the Times:

Arthur Gelb, a former managing editor for The New York Times, wrote in his memoir, “City Room” (2003), that when Mr. Johnson joined the paper in February 1966, he was the only black reporter at The Times.

The next month, Mr. Johnson covered racial unrest and violence in the Watts section of Los Angeles, seven months after the riots there, notably beginning one article with a dramatic quotation from the owner of a shoeshine parlor: “These kids hate white people — they hate them very strongly.”

Mr. Johnson won several awards for his coverage of black servicemen in Vietnam and Europe. He found that many black soldiers resented being sent into danger when civil rights demonstrators were being harassed at home.

Mr. Johnson was frequently called upon to find the views of black people on important issues, including the investigation of a prominent black member of Congress, the Rev. Adam Clayton Powell Jr., by a House committee in 1967. The next year, he began an early article on a nascent black power organization with a question: “Who are the Black Panthers and what do they want?”

Mr. Johnson also covered many events having nothing to do with race. Mr. Gelb credited him with “stiffening our resolve” to plunge into an investigation of corruption at the Human Resources Administration in 1968.

While working at The Times, Mr. Johnson was based in Lagos, Nigeria, from 1972 to 1975, and earlier held temporary postings in Vietnam, Europe and the Caribbean.

A less publicized but equally important part of Johnson’s legacy is his introduction of the issue race into the study of journalism. His NY Times obituary explains his innovation in this area:

The journalism course he taught at New York University from 1969 to 1972, “Race and the News Media,” was widely imitated.

Black on Campus extends heartfelt condolences to Johnson’s family, and honors his legacy as a pioneer in journalism and journalism education.

• Read Thomas A. Johnson’s “A Graduate of the Black Press Looks Back“
• Read Johnson’s New York Times obituary

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Black students protest humiliation of Black workers in University of Orange Free State underground video.

Earlier this week, NPR’s News and Notes broadcast an interesting analysis of a news story out of the Orange Free State in South Africa. I blogged on this story at twilightandreason.wordpress.com back on March 19, 2008. You can read the full text of my blog entry, “Integration Woes Plague South African University,” at THIS LINk to my repost onto this website.

The News and Notes report raises some interesting questions about whether or not it would even have been possible for the workers to consent to eat the unrine-tainted food prepared by the white students. The News and Notes report asserts that the workers who were forced to eat the tainted food had no choice but to do as they were told by the white students, given the ways in which the historical relationship between Black menial laborers and the white minority in the highly segregationist Orange Free State continue to shape the interactions between Black and white people there.

To hear the News and Notes report click THIS LINK.

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White students at South Africa’s University of the Orange Free State force Black workers at the school to eat urine-tainted food from dishes placed on the ground. The video of these antics surfaced in late winter.

I’ve been following the story of the struggle to integrate the higher education system in South Africa’s Orange Free State. For those who are not familiar with this region, this excerpt from a January report in The City Press, a southern African news weekly, describes a bit of the history of this region, known as a haven for many of the most inflexible of South Africa’s white apartheid supporters:

THE Orange Free State was one of the four provinces of the old republic. And it was the province most notorious for practising the worst forms of racism.

Having run away from the “liberal” Cape, the descendants of the Dutch settlers established the “Vrystaat” [“free state”] as their own ­Canaan.

Blacks of Indian origin could not even sleep over in the province. They could only drive through.

from City Press, March 1, 2008

According to City Press, IOL, and other South Africa-based news sources, the UFS administration has continued to take proactive steps toward opening the institution to students of color. City Press notes that, “Over the past few years the university’s administration has tried hard to enforce transformation.” The white students at the institution, however, have been somewhat more resistant to the change in the racial makeup of the student body, and much of their resistance has taken place within the residence halls (called hostels), a flashpoint for conflict between students of color and white student segregationists.

During the last few weeks, the University of the Free State (UFS), a self-described “multicultural” institution located in the region’s major city of Bloemfontein, has hit a particularly rocky patch on the road toward integration. The conflict between the administration of the University, which supports full integration, and those white students who wish to preserve segregation in the residence halls has come to a head around the leak of a racist video made by a handful of students.

Read the rest of this entry »

A shout out to the Schools Matter blog for it’s June 4, 2008 post on Wake Forest University’s recent decision to abandon its SAT Requirement.

In a post titled, “Only Bad Reasons Remaining to Require the SAT” Jim Horn, the Schools Matter blogger, sums up the problematic nature of the College Board’s “aptitude” test and its deleterious effect on educational equity:

Clearly, the SAT has outlived its reason for being in the first place, which was institutionalized ostensibly to create the basis for an objective measure from which to establish an intellectual meritocracy and to predict the success rates of incoming freshmen. With scores simply mirroring disparities in family income, and with women, who score lower than men, finishing college at a higher rate than their counterparts, the SAT has failed on both counts.

What the SAT continues to do well is to make sure that social reproduction is achieved, that privilege is rewarded with enrollment in most of the best colleges, and that those who are struggling to overcome economic and social barriers are cut off at the knees. Well, Wake Forest is no longer one of those. Here’s to Wake!!

Horn also reprints the letter from Wake Forest’s Provost and Director of Admissions, announcing the change in admission requirements to the University staff and faculty. Here are some highlights:

Across universities and colleges in the U.S., there is more and more evidence that the SAT is less sound as an indicator of college success than we once thought. We are referring to studies showing that high test scores — especially on the SAT — do not predict college success. These studies, coupled with a possible testing bias against women and groups who are marked by ethnic or socioeconomic diversity, and recent SAT scoring errors, suggest that it is time to reconsider the use of standardized tests in the admission process.

Our own Joseph Soares, Associate Professor of Sociology, is an important contributor to this national conversation on college admissions. In his recent book, “The Power of Privilege: Yale and America’s Elite Colleges,” Joseph argues that current admissions policies are not resulting in equality of opportunity at our nation’s best colleges. As he points out, approximately 80% of students at America’s top colleges are from families of the highest socioeconomic status. He presents compelling evidence that reliance on the SAT and other standardized tests for admission is a major barrier to access for many worthy students.
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Many liberal arts institutions, however, have studied these issues already and decided to make the SAT optional. Now at least 30 of the 2008 Top 100 U.S. News & World Report “Best Liberal Arts Colleges” have SAT-optional policies in place. The list includes Bates, Bowdoin, Hamilton, Middlebury, Smith, and Mount Holyoke — all ranked within the top thirty. Why have these distinguished colleges dropped the SAT requirement?

Studies show that there is little or no difference in the college GPAs of those who submit SAT scores and those who do not. In 1984, for example, Bates College made the SAT optional, and now about a third of each class enters without submitting an SAT score. In a 20-year study of their policy and its results, Bates found that the difference in the performance of the SAT submitters and non-submitters is not significant (GPA average of 3.06 for non-submitters and 3.11 for submitters). The difference in Bates’ graduation rates between submitters and non-submitters is one-tenth of one percent (0.1%).

In addition, Bates linked their SAT-optional policy to almost doubling their total application pool and, more importantly, found that applications increased from all the subgroups that commonly worry about standardized testing: women, U.S. students of color, international students, low-income students, and rural students.

Bates also reported that non-submitters are slightly more likely to choose creative majors like art and theater. Although their admission numbers for students of color and international students have increased, white students opting not to submit SAT scores outnumber students of color 5-to-1 at Bates.
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During our discussions here at Wake Forest, evidence that standardized testing is still biased against some groups of students, limiting access for minority and low-income students, for example, influenced the decision. According to The National Center for Fair & Open Testing, a non-profit organization that critiques standardized testing, women consistently receive lower scores than their male counterparts despite the fact that women — as a group — earn higher grades in both high school and college.
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“Does reliance on standardized testing limit access to our university by discouraging applications from students who would succeed, and even thrive, if they got in?”

Our response is that Wake Forest is completely committed to equity — and we do not like the idea that just by its very nature, one test might eliminate qualified students who would do well here. By making the SAT optional, we are more open to all the factors that qualify a student. And we are making the admission decisions ourselves.

We look forward to welcoming the best students from all backgrounds, including members of minority groups, international students, women, and men. With this change, we expect the entering class not only to be stronger, but to be more interesting as well.

Having recently spent time at my own undergraduate alma mater, I am inclined to wonder whether or not the institutions of the Ivy League will be dropping the SAT requirement at any point in the near future. As a former admission officer at one of these institutions, I must say that I have mixed feelings about the move to leave any morsel of information about the applicant behind.

By the same token, however, I believe that college admissions committees can learn to read the SAT more effectively, emphasizing it for students at the highest levels of scoring (students with 750 or above on the verbal and math portions), and de-emphasizing it for students whose scores fall into that vast middle range. After all, my experience of evaluating student applications (at my old alma mater and at my current place of work) is that it is in the great high middle (students with scores from about 550 to 700) that the SAT provides the least information; and it is only at the extremes (scores below 400 and above 750) that the results are most reliable.

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Indiana University Vice President for International Affairs Patrick O’Meara (left) shows Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf some of IU’s most precious collections including a copy of George Washington’s letter accepting the presidency of the United States. Johnson was in Bloomington to receive an honorary doctor of laws. Photographed by CHRIS MEYER/IU COMMUNICATIONS — Courtesy of Indiana University

Barack Obama as a Harvard Law Student (Joe Wrinn/ Harvard University News/ File) .

June 3, 2008, 10:42am

Sixteen minutes ago the Associate Press reported than an AP tally of convention delegates confirms that presidential hopeful Barack Obama has earned the Democratic Party nomination. To read the entire text of the AP report, click on THIS link.

Throughout this election season, I have wondered whether or not Obama’s victory in several primaries would have an impact on Black educational attainment. I asked myself this question, based on the notion that, whether or not he became the Democratic nominee, Obama’s success in so many state primaries (including a number of states with very few Black voters) effectively eliminated the limits of possibility for Black achievement.

Might his success, I wondered, trickle down to America’s Black youth, making it more difficult to write off high educational achievement and its rewards as something that offered no true possibility of upward mobility, financial self-determination, and the fulfillment of life dreams and goals?

Now that Obama has clinched the Democratic nomination, my question remains. Often the spectre of racism feels daunting, especially to young people for whom whiteness has only represented the oppressive hand of law enforcement and social services. It is no surprise that such youngfolks have internalized the notion that true prosperity and achievement is impossible within a majority white nation.

Obama’s success must necessarily change that perception, however, as it illustrates how — even despite the persistence of individual and institutional racism — Black people can reach unprecedented levels of success and power.

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Aaron Frazier, a student a Harvard University and an aspiring lawyer, will be one of 800 current and former Black Scholars, college officials, parents and family members on hand at the 2008 Urban League of Rochester Salute to Black Scholars Dinner.

Aaron Frazier, currently an undergraduate philosophy major at Harvard University, and Allen Williams, who will enter Princeton University this fall, will be on hand to welcome new inductees into the Urban League of Rochester Black Scholars program. La Rhonda Leonard, who earned both her bachelor’s in computer engineering and her M.B.A. from Clarkson University and is also a former Urban League of Rochester (ULR) Black Scholar, will be a featured speaker at the Salute to Black Scholars Event.

All three of these former Urban League Scholars attribute a measure of their success to the ULR and it’s Black Scholars program, which seeks to identify promising high school students and then support them through high school and the college application process. The program offers annual workshops on college survival skills, the college admission process, and financial aid. It also awards scholarships. Tomorrow’s event (to be held on Tuesday, June 3, 2008) will recognize over 300 students fro their outstanding academic performance.

For more information on the Urban League of Rochester’s Black Scholars Program click on THIS link.

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