Dr. William R. Harvey, president of Hampton University and chairman of the White House Advisory Board on Historically Black Colleges and Universities, cut straight to the chase in his opening remarks at the National HBCU Week Conference.
“Federal support for HBCUs is showing an alarming downward trend, and our friends in Washington need to know that we are watching and counting,” Harvey said Monday.
Funding is down across the board for African-American students and HBCUs, Harvey said. He deplored the Parent PLUS loan situation as a “debacle” and noted that HBCUs have been left out of an important national alliance designed to serve minority and low-income students.
Harvey’s statement helped open up a volley of critiques of the Department of Education and fears about the future. Though institutions are still reeling from the consequences of the revised criteria for obtaining Parent PLUS loans, they are already looking ahead with concern to the impending rollout of the proposed College Ratings System.
At a panel on Tuesday morning, representatives from the U.S. Department of Education defended some of their decisions and addressed some of their errors.
Ted Mitchell, Under Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education, said, “We made mistakes in the Parent Plus loan, straight up, made mistakes. It shouldn’t have happened the way it did.”
The Education Department has acknowledged flaws in the Parent Plus loan decision and is working to reconsider it. “Just a few months ago, right when I was coming into the Department, the group came to some broad consensus about how to refashion the Plus Program,” Mitchell said, adding that details would be revealed in October.
