One Thousand HBCU Students to be Awarded Scholarships to Study in China

President David Wilson of Morgan State University and Sheng Jianxue, secretary general of the China Education Association for International Exchange, sign a Memorandum of Understanding that established the collaboration.Over the next few years, 1,000 scholarships will be available to students enrolled at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) to study at Chinese universities. The new scholarship program, which will enable HBCU students to participate in study programs in durations from four weeks to two years, is the centerpiece of a wide-ranging agreement between the Chinese government and the historically Black colleges and universities pilot network leadership group signed recently in Beijing, China.

On July 9, Morgan State University president David Wilson, while leading the HBCU pilot network delegation during the 5th U.S.-China Consultation on People-to-People Exchange event, signed a Memorandum of Understanding along with Sheng Jianxue, the secretary general of the China Education Association for International Exchange (CEAIE), establishing the HBCU-Chinese Universities Collaboration. The collaboration includes the scholarship program, which begins this fall and runs through fall 2017, and authorizes the HBCU pilot network and Chinese institutions to pursue other institutional exchanges.

While the HBCU pilot network group that traveled to Beijing included representatives from eight schools, the scholarship program is open to students at all of the nation’s 104 HBCUs, according to the collaborative Memorandum of Understanding. Additionally, the memorandum specifies that the HBCU-Chinese University Collaboration Network be established to include 50 HBCUs and 50 Chinese colleges and universities.

“This is the first time that a country has reached out to HBCUs as a collective group of institutions to say to us, ‘We want your students to come to our country at our expense to understand our history, our culture, our economic system, our norms, our values because we understand that you are rising as are we,’” Wilson told Diverse.

“This is huge for HBCUs. It is providing our students with an opportunity to get some real deep understanding of a rising economic power and to do it in real time,” he added.

Tougaloo College president Beverly Wade Hogan told Diverse that she believes the agreement provides HBCUs a new measure of credibility and visibility within the global higher education community. “We’ve had in the last few years a national discussion about the relevance of HBCUs. I really think this [partnership] casts HBCUs in another kind of light in American higher education,” she said.

“We left [Beijing] really thinking that the Chinese are beginning to understand the value of our institutions and the contributions that our institutions make in the area of STEM production, our innovative teaching and how we help to develop critical thinking skills in our students through our liberal arts core curricula,” added Hogan, who was part of the HBCU pilot network delegation.