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Originally Posted by IvySpice
About 20 of them, according to the article, plus another 12 or 15 small colleges. My original post was responding to a specific statement about the Ivy Leagues that was incorrect. The Ivy League school with the lowest black graduation rate is Cornell at 83%. This is better than the HBCU with the highest graduation rate. Even if you believe that Harvard is handing out degrees in "underwater basketweaving" to all comers, do you believe that about Caltech, MIT, Rice, and Notre Dame, all of which have higher black graduation rates than any HBCU?
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Most Ivy Leagues are universities with secondary degrees. They are calculating these numbers from the graduate school education. Most grad schools only admit those students they plan to graduate, period... It does not look good if they flunk students out in grad school. No where in the report I read indicated they only have Undergraduate numbers. So the comparion to HBCU vs. Ivy Leage numbers is unfair, even if we are talking the HBCU that have graduate programs. There are now ~10 schools: Howard, Meharry, Morehouse Med, Atlanta U., FAMU, Bethune-Cookman
and I think Virginia Union. There are a few others, but I don't remember off hand. Spelman, since I graduated there and donate all my Alumnae money to, does not have a graduate school...
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My point is this. HBCUs are the best choice for many students for a long list of reasons, many of which satisfied alumni have already pointed out on this thread. But high graduation rates are not on the list. The majority of students at the HBCUs with the highest graduation rates (such as Spelman, Morehouse, Howard, Fisk, and Hampton could go to top-20 PWIs like Harvard if they wanted to, so it really doesn't matter to them that the black graduation rate at fourth-tier PWIs is pitiful. The students we're talking about are choosing between HBCUs and the Ivy League et al., and the Ivy Leagues are doing a very good job of graduating their black students. That doesn't mean it's wrong to choose an HBCU over an Ivy -- it just means that it's wrong to suggest that "piss poor" black graduation rates at the Ivies ought to be a factor in the decision.
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But based on the total population that the Ivies have and graduation rates they claim in this report do not correlate with the numbers I have read or calculated. Yes, 8 out of 10 are graduating--but out a population of 100 where half drop out? That is an unfair correlation. This was a prospective study, after data was calculated and it was a cross-sectional. A snapshot is showing a pretty picture. But when you make the comparison to non-Af Am students, it is a poorer prognosis for self-ID'ed AfAm students.
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The NCAA is required to collect and report the data according to guidelines set by the Department of Education. That's why the data can be considered both NCAA and DoE statistics.
http://www.psu.edu/ur/archives/inter.../gradrate.html (scroll to the bottom of the page)
Do you have any reason to doubt that the NCAA information is accurate? I trust that the folks at JBHE know what they're talking about.
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These rates are almost 10 years old. How are they significant today? Then they were developed by a nonHBCU school. Yet, still it is used as a marketing tool against HBCU's even if it is subliminal. "We have better graduation rates if you attend here vs. Spelman..." "Blah Blah Blah..."
And people buy into this "excellent education" at a quasi Ivy League school to make a misconceived quota one must fulfill. Well, with marketing and targeting like this without full examination of the data by professionals--and yes, I am one of them, to query significant questions, you dayum right I am not trusting anything these folks say at first glance. Also, I have young people coming to my office constantly crying as to the isolation they feel while attending these schools. No, I don't do these kind of formal research projects, I do more biomedical ones, but I still educate students and am forced to do Black College Professor teaching on these same students that I know still exists in the classrooms at HBCU's...
So, when I recommend schools to high school folks, I ask them, do you want to stay home, or do you want to go away?