There are more College-Educated Black males in College than those in Prison!!!!
Accentuate College's Positive, Not Rap's Negative
By Dr. Michael L. Lomax
Special To The Commercial Appeal
April 22, 2007
True or false: A college education is more important than ever.
True or false: There are more African-American men attending college today.
True or false: There are more college-age black men in prison than in college.
Give yourself credit if you marked the first question true. People who get ahead in today's economy start by getting a college degree. Almost all the fastest-growing careers require at least a college degree. The college graduate makes twice as much as the high school graduate.
You can also give yourself credit if you marked the second question true. More black males than ever before are applying to college, enrolling and getting their degrees.
The third question? That one is false -- 179,500 black men ages 18 to 24 are in prison. But 469,000 -- more than two-and-a-half times as many -- are enrolled in college.
You often read that there are more black men in prison than in college. But that misleading statistic compares the number of black men in college, almost all of whom are in their teens or twenties, with the number of all black men, of any age, in prison. It's like comparing apples to oranges.
But what about those 179,500 young black men who are in prison? As president of the United Negro College Fund (UNCF), an association of 39 private historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and America's largest minority college scholarship provider, I'm concerned about what we can do to keep them out of trouble and out of jail.
There is one thing that drastically reduces the chances of going to prison: having a college degree. We also know that African-Americans are statistically much more likely to stay in college and graduate if they attend an HBCU like LeMoyne-Owen College, our UNCF member school here in Memphis, or all-male Morehouse College in Atlanta or co-ed Claflin University in Orangeburg, S.C.
Getting a college degree doesn't start in college. You have to have a good high school education. Far too many African-American males have been tracked into courses that won't ever get them ready for college, as Bill Gates has put it, no matter how well the students learn or the teachers teach.
There are proven models for helping young black men achieve success in school, and one of them is in Memphis: the KIPP Diamond Academy, part of a national group of predominantly minority, nonprofit public charter and contract schools. (I am on KIPP's national board of directors.) With longer school days and more effective teaching approaches, KIPP students' average test scores equal those for all City of Memphis and State of Tennessee public schools, which have a much smaller percentage of minority and low-income students.
But the path to getting a college degree -- and the sharply improved chances of staying out of trouble that come with that degree -- has to start even before high school. It has to start at home and in the community.
As members of the black community, we are all responsible for refocusing on education, especially college education, as the pathway to professional careers and the middle class. We must teach our young people that in the 21st century, the jobs that are available to applicants with only high school diplomas will not support the middle-class life style, the lives of security, stability and service that we want for them and that they want for themselves.
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Posted By: C H
Saturday, April 28th 2007 at 11:50PM
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