Free Republic

The nation's oldest black college, Cheyney University, one of Pennsylvania's 14 state-run universities, is on the verge of a financial meltdown that threatens its ability to continue operating, a state official said on Wednesday. Cheyney's student body has shrunk by two-thirds, to about 1,000, since its 1983 peak, and its four-year graduation rate is just 9 percent. A quarter of students never receive a degree, and student loan defaults are high.

The students at Bowie State University, a historically black college in Maryland, have Obamacare to thank for the cancellation of their student insurance plans. As Campus Reform reports, Bowie State cites a jaw-dropping increase in student premiums as necessitating the cancellations: The official website for Bowie State, a Maryland public school less than an hour's drive from Washington D.C., explains that Obamacare's new regulations would force the cost of the insurance to rise from $50 to $900 a semester. "Bowie State University has suspended offering health insurance for domestic students for the 2013-2014 academic year," states the school's official website....

It opened in the late 19th century as the Bluefield Colored Institute, created to educate the children of black coal miners in segregated West Virginia. Although it still receives the federal funding that comes with its designation as a historically black institution, today Bluefield State College is 90 percent white. The road that separates those realities is as rocky as any story of racial transition in post-World War II America. I was on the campus of Bluefield State with my colleague Shereen Marisol Meraji on homecoming weekend because we wanted to see what campus life was like at this unusual...

Saying the rising costs of college are punishing students who’ve played by the rules, President Obama on Thursday said he’ll ask the federal government to take a broader role in lowering tuition costs by rating schools based on their educational value, and trying to tie future taxpayer aid to how well schools do. Mr. Obama, speaking at the State University of New York-Buffalo, said he’ll cap student loan repayments at 10 percent of their future paychecks, but will also take steps to punish students who are attending school on federal grants by doling out the money in chunks to make...

MR. EARNEST: I actually have a little announcement at the top to review with you. I wanted to talk to you a little bit more this afternoon about the President’s upcoming bus tour through New York and Pennsylvania where he is going to talk about his vision for ensuring a better bargain for the middle class.... So the record -- the President’s record on these issues -- he has a bias in favor of historically black colleges and universities because of the service they provide and because of the quality education that they provide to their students.

Five young American Muslims arrested in Pakistan met with representatives of an al-Qaida linked group and asked for training but were turned down because they lacked references from trusted militants, a Pakistani law enforcement official said Thursday. SNIP Javed Islam, a regional police chief in Pakistan, said the men wanted to join militants in the country's tribal area before crossing into Afghanistan and said they met with a banned military organization, Jaish-e-Mohammed in Hyderabad, and with representatives of a related group, Jamat-ud-Dawa, in Lahore. Another law enforcement official, Usman Anwar, the local police chief in Sargodha, told The Associated Press...

HBCUs Fail Title IX by: Don Irvine, February 29, 2008 Compliance with Title IX which can even be a struggle for some of the larger colleges and universities in the country is a particular problem for the nation’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU's) according to a new study released this week by the College Sports Council. According to the study there are nearly 212,000 students enrolled at the nation’s HBCUs with 61% being female, meaning that on the average, to comply with Title IX, 61% of all the athletes at these schools should be female. When applying the proportionality...

A Guthrie woman smiled through her tears Wednesday after a federal jury sided with her in a long-running dispute with Langston University. Debra Jenkins, a white woman who has worked at the historically black college since 1979, was awarded nearly $300,000 in damages in her racial discrimination and retaliation case. The eight-person jury deliberated for less than an hour Wednesday. "It's a great day," Jenkins said. "It's been a long time coming." Jenkins, 45, began her battle with the university in 2000, when she says she was passed over for a promotion to payroll supervisor in favor of a black...

While engaged in an intellectual discourse with one of my closest confidantes, I recently heard the distressing phrase, "Black colleges do not prepare their students for the real world . . . the world isn't all black." Because this came from a person who attends a majority-white, public institution and who is not acutely aware of the black college environment, I did not immediately react. I pondered the question: Does my institution, Morehouse College, a four-year historically black liberal arts college for men in Atlanta, actually prepare its students for the real world? In an academic world of public and...