Tuesday, November 17, 2015

Black Colleges Are Going Online, Following Their Students And The Money - Molly Hensley-Clancy, BuzzFeed

With online for-profit schools leading a boom in black college enrollment, historically black colleges are learning, cautiously, from the model. Now, amidst a push by one of the largest benefactors of historically black colleges, the country’s HBCUs are beginning to figure out how they fit into an online space once dominated by for-profit colleges. They are struggling, too, with the question of what an online education at a black college looks like. “Generally speaking, HBCUs, especially public HBCUs, are behind the curve on this one,” said Johnny Taylor, the president of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, which supports most of the country’s public HBCUs. Taylor believes that building online programs is a matter of dire urgency, and even survival, for historically black schools. They need online programs to compete with majority-white institutions for the older, nontraditional students that tend to be attracted to online programs. http://www.buzzfeed.com/mollyhensleyclancy/black-colleges-are-going-online