A bevy of historically black colleges and universities are hemorrhaging too many students while revenue sources have dried up to the point where it threatens their very survival.
Legendary radio host and famed HBCU advocate Tom Joyner will launch an ambitious online education initiative to stem the bleeding at the institutions, bring back throngs of black students and, most importantly, help many more of them graduate.
“We need to help our students, — not only K-12 — but as the President said, we need more college graduates. And to have more college graduates, we need to do something about our college system, especially HBCUs. You know I love HBCUs,” Joyner said at the National Urban League Centennial Convention in Washington, D.C. on Thursday. “So what we’re doing is we’re going to change things in 2010; we’re going to launch HBCUs online in September. We’re going to compete with the University of Phoenix and the rest of the for-profit [colleges]. That’s where most of our black students are going.”
Over 500,000 students attend the University of Phoenix; a full third of them are African Americans, mostly adults, Joyner noted. But most of them don’t graduate. That’s going to change under the Joyner plan, he said.
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SOURCE: Rolling Out
