CAPE GIRARDEAU, Mo.
A decade-long effort to attract and retain more Black students to Southeast Missouri State University is paying off.
The Cape Girardeau-based university has a record 873 Black undergraduate and graduate students enrolled this fall. That’s 545 more than in 1995. Black students are 8.4 percent of the university population this year, compared with 4 percent a decade ago.
Tanetra Flewellen has seen the difference just walking around campus.
“When we first came here we knew everybody,” said Flewellen, 19, a sophomore from St. Louis. Now, she and her friends regularly run into Black students who are total strangers.
The university, segregated until 1954, this fall enrolled 819 Black undergraduate students among the nearly 9,000 total students, giving it a higher percentage of Black undergraduates than the 2004 statewide average of 8.5 percent among 13 public, four-year colleges in Missouri. Last fall, Blacks made up 7.4 percent of Southeast Missouri’s undergraduate students.
Among Southeast’s 1,679 beginning freshmen this fall, Blacks account for 13 percent of the students. Southeast has 54 Black graduate students, amounting to 4 percent of the school’s 1,324 graduate students.
