Perception Matters
About six years ago, Meredith Anderson, director of K-12 research at the United Negro College Fund, sat in on several focus groups with students from historically Black colleges in preparation for a study on Black high-school students’ perceptions of college.
“We were trying to talk about college readiness,” said Anderson. “But something that came up pretty organically in the conversation was that they wanted more information about HBCUs when they were in high school.”
The students felt like their high-school counselors had dissuaded them from applying to HBCUs, pushing majority-white state schools on them instead. When it came to HBCUs, their counselors lacked accurate information and exposure, students said.
Anderson recalled one student saying counselors at her school “actually dissuaded us from going to HBCUs because they felt like it couldn’t do anything for us.
“They had to go out of their way to find information about HBCUs,” she said.
Many high-school counselors neglect to tell students about HBCU options, UNCF researchers said in a recent visit to The Chronicle’s offices in Washington, D.C. More than three-quarters of the members of the American School Counselor Association are white.
White counselors are less likely than Black counselors to know about HBCUs and are more likely to diminish their value, the researchers said, citing a qualitative study from UNCF and the nonprofit Charter Schools Growth Fund.
Last month, I wrote about how the perception of historically Black colleges and universities has shifted in recent years. Black colleges, long portrayed by the mainstream media as mismanaged, cash-strapped, and on the brink of closure, came to be seen as engines of social and economic mobility, the apex of Black culture, and worthy of large financial donations. In September, for example, UNCF was one of six nonprofits to share a $100-million Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation gift aimed at bolstering student success.
Scholars and advocates credit this shift in part to the racial reckoning of 2020 and the increased public and financial support of HBCUs from celebrities and political leaders.
In 2019 UNCF published and widely promoted “The HBCU Effect,” a series of studies touting the things Black colleges do well. According to their research, HBCUs make up 3 percent of colleges yet educate 10 percent of all Black students. HBCUs also account for 19 percent of the degrees earned by Black students in STEM, 80 percent of Black judges, 50 percent of Black lawyers, and 50 percent of Black doctors. This year, UNCF created “The HBCU Resource Guide” to equip education professionals like counselors with more knowledge about HBCUs.
Undergraduate college attendance has fallen almost 10 percent since 2020, but the decline has been even worse among Black students. From 2010 to 2020, the number of Black students on college campuses fell to 1.9 million from 2.5 million.
But it’s not because Black students don’t aspire to college, Anderson said. She found that Black high-school students want to go to college and graduate. But when asked about the main barriers, 21 percent said they didn’t know how to pay for it, 11 percent lacked support services like counselors, and 10 percent didn’t understand the FAFSA, according to Anderson’s 2018 report “A Seat at the Table.”
For me, this story is personal. When I was a junior in high school, I applied to a dozen colleges and universities with the support of my school counselor. I figured I had a good mix. I had out-of-state schools and in-state schools, privates, and publics, but not one HBCU. My counselor hadn’t listed one as an option for me. I didn’t even know what an HBCU was despite living in Maryland — a state with four of them. It was my parents who, knowing I didn’t have any family savings to fall back on, suggested I apply to Morgan State University.
Morgan awarded me a full scholarship to study journalism, but I got much more than a degree by attending an HBCU — something my high-school counselor failed to articulate.
Throughout my K-12 education, I was always one of the few Black students in the classroom. At Morgan, there was something empowering about being on a campus where Black students were the majority.
I got to attend classes with professors who looked like me. I was exposed to the brilliant work of Black writers like Toni Morrison and Audre Lorde. Morgan provided me with the confidence to step into majority-white spaces. My education there also equipped me with the skills to think critically about issues around race and racism. (I graduated from Morgan State in May 2021.)
—Oyin Adedoyin
