White Students At Black Colleges
COLUMBIA, S.C. - Michael Roberts has done more than study finance at historically Black Benedict College. He’s played football, joined a frat and proposed to his girl.
Pretty typical, except that Roberts is White.
“When I tell people I attend Benedict, they comment, ’Well, you’re not Black,”’ Roberts said. “But it’s still a school, I’m still getting an education. You don’t have to be Black to attend.”
Officials for the nation’s historically Black schools say Roberts’ experience is typical. Whites (males especially) are being enticed with offers of scholarships, and tuition's costing sometimes $10,000 less than their White counterparts at comparable private institutions.
The first Black college was Cheyney University in Pennsylvania, which was founded in 1837 so that Blacks — barred from attending many traditional schools — could get advanced educations. Since then, more than 100 such institutions have been established in the U.S. and about 285,000 students attend the schools each year.
In the 2005-06 school year, however, nearly 10 percent of students at HBCU's were White. Lawsuits have forced many of the schools — about half of them are public — to diversify their student bodies. Couple that with the percentage of Black men declining on campuses, and you have a perfect storm for these institutions becoming increasingly White, Latino, and Asian.
Steven Schukei, a White Morehouse alumnus who now works as a vice president for investment firm Goldman Sachs, said he gained a perspective that he wasn’t offered while growing up and going to school in Nebraska, Colorado and South Carolina.
Schukei, 30, remembers Morehouse as a “refuge from the rest of the world where what race you are doesn’t really matter.”
While I have nothing against other races going to Black schools, we need to keep it real family. Sisters represent as much as 70 percent of the students on some of these campuses. And I've heard some frank discussions about the dramatic rise in lesbian relationships - some of it having to do with the lack of quality brothers to choose from. Is there reason to be concerned?
You tell us!
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