INDIANAPOLIS — Despite fiscal cutbacks and high presidential turnover, HBCUs continue to do more with less, according to three veteran HBCU leaders who appeared on a panel at the annual National Conference on Race and Ethnicity in American Higher Education.
“We are going to survive but that’s not all we need to do,” said Dr. Norman C. Francis, president of Xavier University in New Orleans and currently the longest serving college president in the United States. “We have to thrive.”
Francis joined Dr. Beverly Wade Hogan, president of Tougaloo College and Dr. Sidney A. Ribeau, the former president of Howard University, in a lively two-hour discussion focused on challenges and solutions that beset the nation’s 105 HBCUs.
“Do not fall into the trap of believing what is said about us,” said Francis. “I’m past this business of trying to defend what we are.”
Still, he acknowledged that the “cancer of enrollment management” has forced him to compete with larger institutions like Louisiana State University, who are “creaming off the brightest students we once served.”
He said that at Xavier and elsewhere, many Black college students are dropping out at unprecedented numbers, not because of poor academic performance, but because they are unable to afford to pay rising tuition costs.
The cost of a college education, coupled with the recent decision by the Obama administration to rewrite the qualifying guidelines for the Parent Plus Loan, forced many HBCU students to drop out.
