If colleges and universities want to find out how to best retain young African-American males, they may want to consult Chidera Okam.
Okam, 20, a senior at California State University, San Bernardino has some concrete and simple ideas that he says can prove useful in keeping young Black men in college.
“The upper-class Black men have to get to the first-year students before they drop out of school,” says Okam, an economics major from Nigeria who has plans to go on to law school. “We have to target these young brothers and educate them about what college is really like.”
Seem simple? Perhaps, but experts say that these kinds of high-touch examples go a long way in strengthening ties between young Black and helping them to graduate at higher rates.
For the past four years, Okam has been a member of the Student African American Brotherhood (SAAB) on his campus — an organization founded by Dr. Tyrone Bledsoe in 1990 — that has been a forerunner to some of the more recent initiatives focused on African-American men, including President Obama’s My Brother’s Keeper initiative.
Since its inception, SAAB has expanded its national presence and now includes more than 200 chapters on college and university campuses and in middle and high schools across the nation.
