For Dr. Freeman Hrabowski III, nothing beats the view from the top of the world that he helped shape during the past 20 years. Even on a day when storm clouds hover, the president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, or UMBC, humbly acknowledges that his academic kingdom looks mighty good.
Visitors flock to the 12,888-student campus, which is also fourth among U.S. research universities in the production of IT degrees and certificates, according to recent data from the Department of Education. It also is the largest producer among those universities of IT graduates in Maryland, the District of Columbia, and Virginia.
UMBC sits along a corridor that leads to the region’s international airport and the nation’s capital. Hrabowski reveals that many who visit are from institutions such as Cornell, the University of Michigan and Louisiana State University, as well as HBCUs including Florida A&M University and Morehouse College.
Since 1988, when he co-founded the famed Meyerhoff Program at UMBC with Baltimore philanthropist Robert Meyerhoff, the university has been successfully doing what some parents, corporations and even President Barack Obama want all in American higher education to be able to do—reinvigorate students’ interest in the sciences and in math while training the next generation of engineers, researchers and scientists.
Though it was at first focused on increasing the number of African-American males attending college and earning degrees in the sciences, today, using federal, foundation and university funding, the Meyerhoff program has broadened its reach to include all high-achieving students regardless of race while still focusing on its commitment to recruiting and retaining underrepresented students, says LaMont Toliver, the program’s director.
According to Hrabowski, UMBC is one of the few predominantly White institutions in the nation that can say that the graduation rates of African-Americans are always as high as any other group and sometimes even higher.
The expertise and zeal Hrabowski brings to STEM and the success of minority students at UMBC are fueled, in part, by his academic background. Hrabowski is a mathematician who graduated with honors at 19 from Hampton Institute (now Hampton University). He earned a Ph.D. in higher education administration and statistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign when he was 24.
