A Prescription for More Black Doctors; New York Times, 9/9/15

Nikole Hannah-Jones; A Prescription for More Black Doctors:

"Historically black colleges like Xavier have written the guidebook on how to educate the nation’s neediest students, but they have always done so with less, and many of these schools are now struggling to survive. Though federal law required states to treat them and predominantly white colleges equally, states never did. Lawsuits over the years have argued that states still fail to do so. In 2004, Mississippi agreed to pay three historically black colleges $503 million when it settled a 30-year-old lawsuit accusing the state of discrimination in how it funded and supported its black public colleges. Alabama settled a similar case in 2006, and in 2013, a federal judge found that Maryland discriminated against its historically black colleges. Louisiana is home to three public, four-year historically black colleges. Last year, the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education published a study showing that while these three colleges awarded 40 percent of all bachelor’s degrees earned by black students at the state’s public universities, they bore the largest percentage of state funding cuts.

As they have fought to get their equal share of government funding, these colleges have also struggled to build endowments. Nationally, black students are the most likely to borrow money to pay for school, and they also graduate with the highest student-­loan debt. That means it takes them much longer before they can write checks to their alma maters instead of to their loan holders. Although the colleges helped build the black middle class, the black middle class is often not in a position to give back."