Cameron Slater spent nearly a decade on the streets in Little Rock, Ark.—he says he saw four friends die within three months—before he enrolled at Pulaski Technical College after a nudge from his pastor.
In his first year, he and his friends noticed some adults on the campus, in North Little Rock, who always seemed to be chatting with black male undergraduates. “We thought they were probation officers,” he says.
The adults were actually academic coaches at the Network for Student Success, a Pulaski effort supported by the U.S. Education Department to improve retention and graduation rates among black male students. Mr. Slater gave the program a try. He was assigned a “success coach,” who helped him identify academic goals. He was advised to sit at the front of his class and introduce himself to his instructors. He was urged to dress in a shirt and tie and to overcome his natural shyness to speak in front of groups.
In his second year, Mr. Slater was elected student-body president. He earned an associate degree in business administration from the community college in 2013, and is now working toward a bachelor’s degree at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
“Once I got into the network, I saw that it was just a bunch of brothers in there cracking jokes—that studying was not all about being uptight,” he says. “I started pulling more and more people in, and letting them know that this is where they needed to be if they wanted to be successful.”
The higher-education struggles of black men are well chronicled. Over the past 15 years, dozens of colleges have started programs designed specifically to get black men enrolled and help them graduate. So far, they are still significantly outnumbered and outperformed on campus by black women. But efforts to improve their experiences are likely to accelerate since President Obama’s announcement in February of the My Brother’s Keeper program, which includes philanthropic pledges of $200-million to help young black students.
Many African-American boys fall behind early in their schooling and never catch up. Fewer than 20 percent are proficient in math and reading in both fourth and eighth grades. Just over half graduate from high school. Only a third of black men in the United States who attend four-year colleges graduate within six years, compared with 45 percent of Hispanic men, 57 percent of white men, and 64 percent of Asian men. Only 17 percent of all black male students who enter community colleges will earn certificates or associate degrees or transfer to four-year institutions within three years.
Advocates say the new programs aren’t just about helping African-American men, but are also key to meeting overall goals related to college completion.
“We’ve got to address the performance challenges in this cohort if we’re going to raise America’s overall attainment level,” says Arlethia Perry-Johnson, director of the University System of Georgia’s African-American Male Initiative.
The oldest programs have been around for a decade or more. Ohio State University’s Todd Anthony Bell National Resource Center on the African American Male, which opened in 2004, provides a four-day program just before classes start to 50 to 60 black male freshmen each year, about a third of the black male students in the entering class. The program emphasizes soft skills—such as motivation and study habits—rather than academic instruction. “We have found that these soft skills tend to have a greater effect on how successful young men are on our campus,” says James L. Moore III, an education professor who directs the center.
Each fall the Bell center holds the Gathering of Men, a networking event for black male students, professors, and community professionals. In February it organizes a two-day, off-campus retreat for black male students from Ohio State and other universities. The weekend event features a diverse schedule, including research-paper presentations, yoga, and sessions on financial literacy and how to deal with police officers they might encounter.
The Bell center’s programs appear to be paying off. Ohio State’s six-year graduation rate for black male undergraduates is now 67 percent, an increase of 30 percentage points since 2002, notes Mr. Moore.
L’nard Tufts, an Ohio State senior majoring in mechanical engineering, says he was often the only black student in his freshman engineering classes. The Bell center’s orientation program, he says, introduced him to other “academically minded African-American males whom I could lean on for support.”
Mr. Tufts also participated in the center’s Leadership Institute, a series of seminars that helped him develop skills that he is tapping this year as founder of a student group, Dexterity 43210. The organization (its name matches Ohio State’s ZIP code), which drew 70 students for its first meeting, intends to create an “overly complex contraption,” he says, and enter it in a Rube Goldberg competition at the Center of Science and Industry, in Columbus.
At the University of Maryland at College Park, black undergraduates helped start the Black Male Initiative in 2005, amid concerns about the relatively small number of black professors on the campus. The group initially met on Saturday mornings for undergraduates and black administrators and professors to get to know one another. Now it holds a monthly community forum on issues such as racial profiling and the criminal-justice system, and arranges volunteer opportunities in local schools for black male undergraduates.
“It started as a tool to help retain black males on a campus that is, in the view of students of color and staff, ‘chilly’ in terms of the cultural climate,” says Solomon Comissiong, a co-founder of the initiative and assistant director of the university’s Nyumburu Cultural Center. “It’s not just for academic reasons that students aren’t retained.”
The Georgia university system’s African-American Male Initiative has programs on 27 of the 31 campuses. The system encourages participation by providing matching grants of up to $30,000 per year. Since the effort’s inception, in 2002, the number of bachelor’s degrees earned systemwide by black men has increased 82 percent, to 2,353 in 2013, officials say.
Each institution designs its own variations. The Georgia Institute of Technology, for example, offers a multiweek immersion program for new black male students, so that they will more quickly appreciate the level of study required to be successful. Less-selective institutions have created programs that help at-risk students with “intrusive advising"—abrupt interventions delivered in person when they cut class or fail assignments.
“We don’t have a cookie-cutter approach, because we don’t have a cookie-cutter system,” says Ms. Perry-Johnson, director of the systemwide initiative.
Some of the most innovative programs nationwide are at community colleges, which enroll more than 70 percent of African-American men who attend public colleges. Some of those institutions, including Baltimore City Community College, receive federal support for their programs from an Education Department program designed to help predominantly black institutions.
Baltimore City is receiving $2.37-million over four years for a program that offers mentoring and tutoring as well as bus tickets and books. In addition to helping students financially, the freebies encourage students to attend workshops on topics like time management, note-taking, and balancing academic work with family responsibilities.
All participants also participate in what the program’s director, Duane O. Reid Jr., calls “community mentoring"—including volunteering in local elementary schools and at a soup kitchen.
The program is on track to graduate about 70 African-American men within three years by next fall, he says, a rate of 45 percent. That’s well above the college’s overall graduation rate for black men, which is roughly 5 percent.
Brian Jones, a 43-year-old native of Washington, D.C., who has battled drug addictions and had numerous run-ins with the police over the past two decades, made his way to Baltimore City in 2012 after completing a six-month drug treatment program. The midlife quest for a college degree hasn’t come easy. Mr. Jones had a three-month relapse with synthetic marijuana (“spice”) last January and has flunked algebra twice. But he’s back on track this semester, has nudged his GPA up to 2.6, and hopes eventually to earn a bachelor’s degree in social work from nearby Coppin State University.
He says he is in touch every day with a case manager and an academic adviser supplied by the program, which requires regular check-ins. “I’ve spent a lot of time wasting my time,” Mr. Jones says. “Now I think I still have time to correct the mistakes that I’ve made.”
Some scholars say the recent protests in Ferguson, Mo., highlight the need for changes in how colleges help black men succeed, even though the shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, by a police officer there had nothing to do with higher education.
“Black men are criminalized in our society, and that affects how police officers and others interact with them,” says J. Luke Wood, an associate professor of community-college leadership at San Diego State University. “Teachers may be thinking, ‘Do I to want this student to come to my office hours? Maybe as a white female, I don’t want a black male coming to my office to meet with me one-on-one.’ "
Mr. Wood, co-director of a research collaborative that studies efforts to help minority men at community colleges, says many black men are leery of higher education to begin with—they may view it as a female sphere, or may hesitate to seek academic help because of a fear that they’ll look dumb.
“In our research, we’ve found that it doesn’t matter how well you teach—if you don’t have a relationship with these guys first, they’re not going to be open to the information,” he says.
Shaun R. Harper, an associate professor of education at the University of Pennsylvania and executive director of the Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education, argues that colleges need to spend far more time and money helping professors understand how their actions, or even unconscious biases, may have a negative impact on black men.
“You can spend hundreds or even thousands of hours helping a black student learn to be resilient and resist harmful racial stereotypes,” Mr. Harper says, “but if the guy goes back into a classroom and the professor is still behaving in a racist manner, or has unchecked assumptions about the student’s background, that resilience only goes so far.”
Yet directors of some student-focused programs say they still see large numbers of students who need almost daily support in order to succeed in college. Kareem Moody, who directs the Network for Student Success program at Pulaski Tech, divides incoming students into groups on the basis of the amount of help they will need. A “green” student, for example, has strong academic skills and motivation and might need advice merely on course scheduling. But a “red” student, like Mr. Slater—someone who has struggled academically, is uncomfortable with college instructors, or perhaps has had run-ins with the law—will receive far more help.
“You have a lot of fatherly talks with those guys to close the door on some things that they might be upset about,” Mr. Moody says.
Mr. Slater, who still spends 15 hours a week at Pulaski working with the network, now shares the lessons he learned from Mr. Moody, which helped him reach the University of Arkansas. For example, email an instructor early, he tells new students, if you know you’re going to miss a class or turn in an assignment late.
“Life happens to all of us,” Mr. Slater tells them. “You want your professor to remember that you’re one of his bright students.”
