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New York Times
30-03-2025
- Business
- New York Times
At Black Colleges, a Stubborn Gender Enrollment Gap Keeps Growing
Before stepping foot on Howard University's campus, Skylar Wilson knew she would see more women there than men. But just how many more stunned her: Howard, one of the most elite historically Black colleges and universities in the nation, is only 25 percent men — 19 percent Black men. 'I was like, 'Wow,'' said Ms. Wilson, a 20-year-old junior. 'How is that possible?' Howard is not unique. The number of Black men attending four-year colleges has plummeted across the board. And nowhere is this deficit more pronounced than at historically Black colleges and universities, or H.B.C.U.s. Black men account for 26 percent of the students at H.B.C.U.s, down from an already low 38 percent in 1976, according to the American Institute for Boys and Men. There are now about as many non-Black students attending H.B.C.U.s as there are Black men. The decline has profound implications for economic mobility, family formation and wealth generation. Raj Chetty, a Harvard economist who uses large data sets to study economic opportunity, has found that the income gap between America's Black and white populations is entirely driven by differences in men's economic circumstances, not women's. The causes are many. Higher college costs, the immediate financial needs of Black families, high suspension rates in high school and a barrage of negative messages about academic potential all play roles in the decline of Black male enrollment and college completion. Howard estimates that its cost of attendance for undergraduates easily exceeds $50,000 a year. 'If we are serious about reducing race gaps in economic opportunity, household wealth, et cetera, then our attention should be squarely focused on economic outcomes for Black boys and men — period. Full stop,' said Richard Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men. But now programs designed to nurture Black academic achievement may be dismantled by the Trump administration, which deems them 'racist' diversity, equity and inclusion efforts. Cultural centers, mentorship programs, work force recruitment activities and scholarship programs are all threatened by the White House's promise to cut funding to universities that do not eliminate what it calls racial preferences. On Wednesday, Mr. Trump asked the Supreme Court to allow him to terminate more than $600 million in teacher training grants, which would decimate two of the Education Department's largest professional development programs. Both were designed to place teachers in underserved schools and diversify the educational work force. 'It's a perpetuating cycle,' said Dr. Cheryl Holcomb-McCoy, chief executive of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. 'If you don't see other Black male educators, then it's hard for you to see yourself in that position.' On Thursday, the Department of Health and Human Services targeted California medical schools for maintaining what Trump administration officials called 'discriminatory race-based admissions,' though bolstering the number of Black doctors has long been a goal of the medical establishment. 'Put simply, educational institutions may neither separate or segregate students based on race, nor distribute benefits or burdens based on race,' Craig Trainor, the Education Department's acting assistant secretary for civil rights, wrote in a memo to universities in February. Black educators say burdens are already distributed unfairly. Society undermines Black men's belief in their own potential, starting from early education and continuing through professional development, said Dr. Derrick Brooms, executive director of the Black Men's Research Institute at Morehouse College, an elite, all-male H.B.C.U. in Atlanta. Colleges like Howard may be the starkest of manifestations. Payton Garcia, a Howard sophomore, recalled being one of three men in his introduction to philosophy class, which has about 30 students. 'We did a Cuba trip,' he recalled. 'I was the only male that was in the class.' Recent shifts in higher education, driven in part by conservative policies in Washington, have wrought large changes in predominantly Black colleges, positive and negative. The Supreme Court's ban on race-based college admissions drove up interest in some H.B.C.U.s and strengthened the application pool overall, Dr. Brooms said. But he's still concerned about the long-term trend. Dr. Brooms said at this point, Morehouse may have to re-evaluate its recruitment strategy, including looking abroad: 'Perhaps there may be some Black men in Canada who may want to attend.' On campuses like Howard's, the gender disparity is understood. Women run the place. 'Everybody knows that the women dominate this campus,' said Tamarus Darby Jr., a 20-year-old sophomore at Howard. 'You see predominantly women out here running for positions, and then you see their friends, young women, showing up for them and supporting them,' he said. 'It's different for the men.' According to students and faculty at Howard, Black male students can have a difficult time finding both themselves and a community. One night last October, young men gathered in small groups on the Howard yard and wrote down what they were most afraid of — 'I have a fear of failure,' said Joshua Hughes, a senior who led the 'burning of the fears' that night. 'I have a fear of letting my family down. I have a fear of not living up to my full potential.' Some read their fears aloud before tossing their writings into a giant firepit as a drum line banged African djembes. In 2019, Calvin Hadley, then a senior adviser to Howard's president, was asked how Howard could better engage men on campus. He put together a survey of students, faculty and staff, and then hosted several barbershop listening sessions. Something clicked. 'We had these very detailed, emotional conversations around manhood, around masculinity, around relationships,' said Mr. Hadley, now Howard's assistant provost for academic partnerships and student engagement. Male fears can work against college attendance, students said. Fears of failure may deter Black men from higher education, even as fears of letting their families down drive them prematurely into the work force, before their earning potential can be reached. Mr. Darby said many of his friends didn't have parents or family who attended college, or they thought the costs were prohibitive. 'So they were trying to find those other avenues to make money and to be successful, not thinking that college was the number one thing that was going to get you there,' he said. As a middle schooler, Jerrain Holmes, a 20-year-old sophomore, recalled thinking: 'College? What is college?' He added, 'I knew I just wanted a job.' But in his Detroit-area high school, he enrolled in a college readiness program, and it made all the difference. 'As a general proposition, young men are arriving on college campuses less skilled academically than women,' Mr. Reeves said. 'That's even more true of men of color, Black men.' That leads to problems of completion, which are at least as significant as declining enrollment. The first year of college is crucial for male retention, and a lack of services can lead young men to feel isolated or that they don't belong, Dr. Brooms said. 'If you can show you can keep people, that folks can persist to graduation, that becomes a recruitment tool itself,' said Dr. Brooms. On a recent warm, breezy spring day on campus, Howard students laid on blankets, chatting. Some set up tables to sell merchandise, displaying the famed entrepreneurial 'Howard hustle.' Others campaigned for student senate or royal court. The gender disparity was on the minds of the students. Christian Bernard, a 22-year-old senior from affluent Potomac, Md., is a third-generation legacy student. He was on the yard selling items from his clothing brand, emblazoned with the slogan 'Worth It.' He started the brand amid the turmoil and grief of June 2020, after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer and the swell of Black Lives Matter demonstrations. He chose Howard for its soccer program and his family ties. Before injuries derailed his athletic career, he made strong friendships with his teammates. 'There's a lot of male camaraderie here at Howard,' he said. Those studying the challenges that young Black men face are careful to avoid a battle of the sexes. Women have faced historical challenges of their own. Some people perceive female gains as a threat to men in a zero-sum battle for resources and power. Mr. Reeves said that is a mistake, particularly when it comes to family formation. Asking the young men on campus how the gender gap affects dating will draw a sheepish grin. They understand their advantage. Young women are thinking about it too. 'Those ratios,' said Nevaeh Fincher, a sophomore, can be 'rough.' 'A lot of the boys feel like they've got options,' Ms. Fincher said, 'which, if we're being honest, they do.' The lack of college-educated Black men could change family structures and bread winning patterns, placing more financial burdens on Black women. College-educated Black women already have higher lifetime earnings than college-educated white women because they work more years over the course of their lives, despite lower annual earnings, according to the Kansas City Federal Reserve. For young women who care about the future of Black America, in general, all of this is alarming. 'We see a lot of school programs and districts that are giving up on students and giving up on Black men before they even give them a chance,' said Ms. Wilson. She's seen it in the male students she mentors, who say their teachers don't offer much encouragement. 'They expect them to be bad,' she said. 'They expect them to be problems.'
New York Times
16-03-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
The View Inside Trump's Assault on Universities
The rumors had been building for months: The Trump administration was coming for the universities. In the weeks after the president issued his first executive orders in January, the effects rippled through my academic world: A Rutgers conference on H.B.C.U.s was canceled; graduate students on visas asked a professor I know if it was safe for them to travel; a colleague at a public university texted about an undergraduate crying in his office, worried about the job landscape. There was news of endangered climate projects, grant pages disappearing (and sometimes later reappearing) as people were applying to them and forestalled scientific programs of all kinds, including one at Columbia's maternal health center studying how to reduce America's maternal mortality rate. A meeting at Yale, where I teach, to discuss the impact of the Trump administration's policies had to be moved to a larger auditorium because so many concerned faculty members showed interest in attending. After listening to a bracing description of the financial implications of the government edicts, we milled about, stunned. The reality was much worse than we had imagined. I run a small program for students who want to be editors and writers. In the grips of uncertainty, I stayed up late that night to figure out which parts I would have to kill if my budget was cut. I finally realized there was no good solution; in that scenario, I would have to cancel the whole thing. Conservatives have been trying to reshape the American university since the federal government began funding it in earnest in the mid-20th century. But now the Trump administration appears prepared to destroy it. The administration has issued sweeping executive orders and deployed the so-called Department of Government Efficiency to slash funding; dismantle diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives; and intervene in university policy. On March 7 the administration announced it was pulling $400 million in federal grants and contracts from Columbia University, alleging 'continued inaction' to protect the civil rights of Jewish students on campus during the protests against the war in Gaza. The result, if all goes through, will be nothing less than the permanent diminishment of research universities and an upheaval of the free speech principles at the core of the country. This attack on higher education has been a long-brewing project for Trump-aligned conservatives. Christopher Rufo, a key architect of the assault, has been explicit about the strategy: use financial pressure to put universities into what he called 'existential terror,' making compliance seem like the only viable option, forcing them to dismantle programs and reshape hiring and curriculums. Mr. Rufo, who was invited to Mar-a-Lago to discuss higher education overhauls shortly after Donald Trump was elected again, views universities as having been 'captured' by leftist ideology and rejects the idea that diversity is a worthwhile goal. He envisions a radical restructuring of the humanities, replacing current frameworks with what he confusingly calls a 'classical' model while bringing in more conservative faculty members. This assault isn't happening in a vacuum, of course. Decades of conservative attacks have primed the public to see universities as elitist indoctrination centers. These attacks date at least to the Red Scare in the 1950s, when suspected Marxist professors were forced to testify before the Senate (and the F.B.I. leaked disparaging information about 400 teachers and professors to their employers). But more recently these attacks have evolved into a strategic, well-funded campaign. As Ellen Schrecker, a historian who studies higher education and political repression, noted in a 2023 essay: 'During the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s … right-wing philanthropists poured millions of dollars into demonizing higher education as infested by 'political correctness' whose advocates supposedly purveyed a dogmatic brand of left-wing identity politics while suppressing free speech and conservative discourse on their campuses.' Mr. Trump and his allies have hammered home that message, fueling Republican distrust in academia, even as soaring tuition costs put private institutions ever more out of reach and the pandemic deepened skepticism in expertise. Gallup polls found that in 2015, 57 percent of Americans had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in higher education, a figure that had dropped to 36 percent by 2023. Among Republicans, it cratered from 56 percent to 20 percent. Some of this distrust stems from the fact that since the late 1990s, the number of university faculty members who identify as liberal has risen, while the numbers of moderates and conservatives have declined. But it's also the product of the right's campaign against universities, which has caricatured them as breeding grounds for a narrow-minded woke ideology that brooks no dissent, rather than the large, complicated places they are. While there have been instances of a campus left that was hubristically convinced of its own point of view, the reality for most of us who teach on campus looks nothing like the distorted portrait that the right has painted. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
05-02-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
At Hillmantok, a Digital H.B.C.U., Class Is in Session
Leah Barlow, a liberal studies professor at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, prepared to teach her Intro to African American Studies class this semester as she always does: She put together a syllabus, mapped out assignments and created a TikTok account to make the material as accessible as possible. She posted a video on Jan. 20 welcoming her 35 students to the course. By the next morning, it had surfaced in the algorithm of enough TikTok users that 250,000 people had subscribed to her channel. Within days, Dr. Barlow's videos had unintentionally inspired a loosely affiliated network of Black educators, experts and content creators to form what has become known as Hillmantok University, a free — and unaccredited and unofficial — online take on the country's H.B.C.U.s, or historically Black colleges and universities In lectures delivered in TikTok-length bursts, and in longer sessions over TikTok Live, instructors are teaching classes in gardening, organic chemistry, culinary arts and other subjects. On the receiving end, organizers say, is an audience of about 16,000 registered users. 'I think that this has been in the making,' Dr. Barlow said in an interview last week from her office in Greensboro, N.C. 'You have accessibility, not just because of TikTok but you also have people who don't have to be in the ivory tower to have the ability to speak. That is something that I find both beautiful and necessary.' The appetite for information also comes at the dawn of a second Trump administration. Dr. Barlow posted her video hours after President Trump was sworn in and swiftly set about dismantling federal programs that promote diversity, equity and inclusion. Many academics fear a trickle-down effect across education. 'I certainly think the political time and the environment is rife with a lot of contention,' Dr. Barlow said, adding that Mr. Trump's assault on diversity programs had given 'fresh urgency' to a project that prioritizes Black voices. Cierra Hinton, a former math teacher in Augusta, Ga., and a founder of Hillmantok, watched Dr. Barlow's original post and some of the early videos inspired by it. 'Did I wake up in Hillman?' she recalled thinking, referring to Hillman College, the fictional H.B.C.U. featured in 'The Cosby Show' and its spinoff, 'A Different World.' A name for the movement was born. Kennddrick Pringley, a publicist and D.J. in Tampa, Fla., also was among the thousands of TikTok users who stumbled onto Dr. Barlow's original post. Now he's Hillmantok's student union president and part of a group of about 40 content creators-turned-volunteers who saw an opportunity to organize. In the face of the uncertainty over the future of education policy under a second Trump administration, Mr. Pringley said a 'social media university' could provide a space to counter the misinformation circulating online. 'Education is becoming limited, covered up, muted and silenced,' he said. 'This is a moment and a movement that can teach the masses everything that they really should know.' Hillmantok's organizers built a website, complete with a course catalog and registration page, and started delivering regular updates on the Hillmantok TikTok account. There is a board of trustees and student governing board; many members of both bodies spent long nights on Zoom creating a formal structure for Hillmantok. 'We're marching together to make sure that everyone has a chance at a free and fair education,' Mr. Pringley said. When Brandi Smith came across Dr. Barlow's page, she was disappointed to find that the class was not actually open to the public. Still, Ms. Smith, who attended Spelman College before graduating from the Savannah College of Art and Design, followed the syllabus Dr. Barlow posted and started holding study sessions on her TikTok page, including on subjects like the documentary '13th' by the filmmaker Ava DuVernay; the songs 'This Is America' by Childish Gambino and 'The Revolution Will Not Be Televised' by Gil Scott-Heron; an episode of the TV show 'Atlanta'; and the essay 'Why I Won't Vote' by W.E.B. Du Bois. 'It was an opportunity to engage with Black women on a level that really spoke to my spirit,' Ms. Smith said. For André Isaacs, an organic chemistry professor at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., Hillmantok presented an opportunity he had long dreamed of: using his growing social media following to share his passion for chemistry and teaching. 'We need science literacy in our country,' Dr. Isaacs said. 'I want to do my part in having people understand the molecules that are in the skin care products they're using, and when we say the word acid, what does that mean on a molecular level?' Dr. Isaacs said that about 1,000 people signed on via Zoom or TikTok Live to hear his first Hillmantok lecture. Since then, about 3,000 people have registered on his website to receive course material, including recorded lectures, lesson plans, homework assignments and even quizzes, along with an open-source textbook and a discussion channel on Discord, the messaging app. Dr. Isaacs was particularly enthusiastic about helping to demystify a subject that is often viewed as inaccessible. 'College tuition nowadays is prohibitively expensive, so a lot of people can't have access to that, especially a lot of Black and brown kids,' he said. 'If they just had an understanding of what it looks like or maybe a leg up in terms of the materials, that would help build their resilience and their enthusiasm about the subject matter.' Dominique Kinsler of Orlando, Fla., is using Hillmantok to change perceptions of another topic that many see as having a high barrier to entry: gardening 'Every time I learn something I want to teach it to other people,' she said. 'It's a lot to do while I work,' referring to her career as a pharmacist, 'but it's a passion. It doesn't feel like a chore.' Ms. Kinsler taught herself to garden during the pandemic, attracting hundreds of thousands of followers with the instructional videos she posts under her social media handle, Pharmunique. So when Hillmantok sprang up, a Gardening 101 class seemed a natural fit. Her first Hillmantok video received about 1,000 views within 30 minutes and more than 1 million by the next day. She's received such an enthusiastic response to her Hillmantok class, she said, that she is working on a textbook. Her approach is simple: To teach people how to garden in the space they have available to them. Hillmantok came at a 'pivotal turning point,' Ms. Kinsler said, especially when it comes to the influence of politics and disinformation. 'People have a bit of fear of what education will look like in the future — will we be able to learn these things?' she said, adding that the recent federal TikTok ban magnified that fear. (The app briefly stopped working this month before flickering back to life after Mr. Trump said he would sign an executive order delaying enforcement of the ban.) 'It felt like somebody took a piece of power away from us,' she said. Now, with Hillmantok, people are taking a different approach, Ms. Kinsler said: 'Let me get a notebook. I want to learn.' Or in Ms. Kinsler's case, fresh plants instead of a pen and paper. For their final project, followers of Ms. Kinsler's Hillmantok course will be asked to show the fruits of their labor: a video of their finished garden.
