From the HBCU Digest:
The Orlando Sentinel this week continued its media framing
assault on Florida A&M University, recently publishing a piece on FAMU’s graduation rates. Hovering around 12-percent four-year undergraduate completion
rate for incoming freshmen, and a 39-percent tick for those completing in six
years, the article wastes no time in giving the reader the usual higher ed porn
found in HBCU stories – students leave saddled with debt and no degree to show
for it.
Here’s the truth about historically black colleges and
universities’ graduation rates, a truth that anyone with cultural and racial
sensibility can appreciate. HBCUs admit and graduate the students that most
four-year institutions won’t consider for enrollment. There are casualties.
Many of them. But giving low-income, high academic-risk students a chance to go
to college is the most socially responsible thing to make those students the
primary advocate for change in their lives, and the lives of their families.
Criticizing HBCUs for low graduation rates is like
criticizing hospitals for high death rates among emergency surgery patients.
Sure, there will be losses when someone gets half of their head blown off in
gun violence, is clinging to life after a car accident or heart attack, or has
suffered a massive stroke. But where else can they go for treatment? Don’t they
deserve a chance to survive and lead a full life afterwards?
Judging the HBCU for students that drop out and don’t pay
back default loans is like judging the homeless person suffering from schizophrenia
who refuses public housing and help. Should they be scorned for not taking the
obvious path to good living, when illness consumes their judgment and critical
thinking skills?
Read the full editorial here at the HBCU Digest.