In a letter to Tuskegee University founding principal Booker T. Washington, Dr. Mark A. Brown, the first alumnus in the university’s history to be named president, writes of modern challenges for an HBCU university president.
Dear Principal Washington,
It’s a new school year at your beloved Tuskegee Normal School, Institute and now University. As the first alumnus to sit in your seat since the school opened in 1881, I’m thinking of you and wondering whether we are living up to the high standards that you established.
I am particularly focused on what you wrote in 1896 in “The Awakening of the Negro.” You argued that education should both enrich the mind and create economic opportunity for Black students. Nearly 130 years later, and 143 years from the establishment of the Tuskegee Normal School, it’s clear that we’re pressing closer and closer toward your economic vision. But we certainly have more to do.”
Disparities in educational attainment and outcomes are numerous and wide-ranging. Black students are more likely to live in poverty and attend high-poverty schools. Not only are they less likely to enroll in college at all, but those who do are far less likely to graduate than white students.
Those who do receive a degree are liable to hold twice the average student loan debt of their white peers. A year after leaving college, Black graduates are twice as likely to be unemployed as all college graduates.
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