Wow. This is incredibly frustrating. This reminds me of the same situation we have here in Raleigh. https://youtu.be/PdS02tWpDNs?si=HlGGwnOxEra9ovJh
‘Chilling reminder’: Multiple historically Black universities under lockdown after receiving threats - ABC News 'Chilling reminder': Multiple historically Black universities under lockdown after receiving threats - ABC News
Who would’ve thought
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Imagine having so much money that you can literally throw it away…
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This is a place for young people’s education. How is investing in that throwing money away? Clarity please.
If you hold your anger for two seconds and actually follow the discussions on this thread, you’ll see that this is because…
…@GucciLittlePig (and quite a few other people here) disagrees with this premise. The idea is that previous leaders and Board of Trustees have mismanaged the university and its finances so badly and for so long that - especially since its accreditation has been in doubt for so long (which is the gold standard for saying whether the education you’re getting is legit) - SAU no longer deserves trust to keep existing as a university. Therefore, I think they’re saying that SAU’s existence is harmful to young people’s education because they’re duping them into wasting money for something that couldn’t possibly benefit them.
To be clear, I’m not taking sides - I totally get how you seem really proud of SAU and want to make sure it exists in perpetuity - but I think it may be helpful to zoom out and see the bigger picture.
Universities and their degrees are only as valuable as how much society trusts that school. For example, I did my bachelor’s at UNC-Chapel Hill (which is obviously a globally reputable institution), and I’m finishing up my PhD there right now. With all of my coursework, projects, research, publications, and international presentations that went into those credentials, you’d think that no one would question me about my academics. …but that’s actually not true.
That’s because I occasionally run into people who are openly skeptical or judgmental of me from the moment I say I’m from UNC-Chapel Hill - not because of the quality of the coursework or research that I actually did to earn my degree(s), Rather, it’s because they bring up fraudulent courses for student-athletes, totally-not-politically-motivated decisions on faculty tenure, its response to a Confederate monument, and claims that its Board of Trustees broke state transparency laws when they hired a former NFL coach. None of those things impacted anything in my coursework, but they were enough for some people to cast doubt on the university - and, by extension, on me.
Although I feel like this is unfair to me, I have to recognize that this is not about me. Because I’m getting a degree from a particular school, my degree is backed up by the credibility of the school. I’m not naive enough to think that “someone gave me a college degree!” is all the validation I need to get somewhere in life. Instead, the value of my diploma(e) come from:
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Why did I get my degree? What standards did I meet to show that I met industry expectations for things I should know?
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How did I get my degree? What kinds of coursework, projects, and other experiences did I have to prepare me in the ways that people think I’m prepared?
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Who does my degree get me access to? What does the alumni network look like, and what kind of social mobility and access does the school’s alumni and the rest of its community afford me?
…and because most people don’t investigate those things for every single college graduate they talk to, “what school did you go to?” becomes a good-enough proxy.
Why does this matter? Because if your university loses people’s trust, then its degrees are no longer valuable to other people. Maybe they matter to you specifically, but that doesn’t matter to a faceless hiring manager or to the LinkedIn algorithm.
So sure, SAU may be able to teach its students some useful things until its last dying breath - whether that happens next year, or sometime in its distant future. But the problem about whether SAU can (and should) continue to exist in its current form is about something much bigger than that. If you really want SAU to continue to exist and to graduate new students, then you need to have a VERY solid answer to support people who are going through the a version of what I’ve been going through (except that the judgments are 100x worse). Not because the students are probably Black and from an HBCU, but because of all the baggage that’s specific to SAU.
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The problem is the university has a significant and proven track record of mishandling and misappropriating money. I think the phrase “throwing good money after bad” applies here.
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true??? 7/30/25 UNC-Chapel Hill Unveils Plan to Cut $70 Million in Response to Funding Pressure UNC-Chapel Hill Unveils Plan to Cut $70 Million if the 70 million can possibly be used to boost curricula in hot demand and remove others….i dont know?
President of next-door Peace gets very real: “If we aren’t savvy businesspeople, and we aren’t thinking about the market, and who we’re marketing to and how we are going to thrive financially, then we will not make it.”
The article has comparative financials for Barton, Campbell, Meredith, NC Wesleyan, St. Aug’s, Shaw, and Peace. It mentions two Presbyterian college casualties in NC: Laurinburg’s St. Andrews University closed this year, and Queens in Charlotte announced a merger with Elon. (Queens is about the size of Meredith, and has a prime location in Myers Park.)
Shaw’s enrollment has fallen by almost half since 2016, while St. Aug’s has been pretty steady. But net tuition revenue at both is now below $8M, and both in 2024 reported operating losses of around $10M/year – and endowments that are scarcely higher.
Shaw enrolled an incoming class of 543 students, a 45% increase from last year, which was itself a 36% increase from 2023.
Their total enrollment (~1,100) is still less than half what it was in 2003 (2,700), but at this rate they will be approaching their old record in a few years.
Has there been any news at all about the Shaw rezoning that passed in June 2023? There was a survey posted on https://www.theshawudistrict.com/ over a year ago and I haven’t heard anything since.
Refresher below
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That is great news about their enrollment! Lets hope they’ve found their footing and continue steady growth in these super challenging times. Thanks for sharing this news.
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This is good news. I hope that their retention and graduation rates are also trending in that same direction.
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not the wrong thread, someone’s joke stripped shaw out of the title
Desperation much?
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OMG that’s embarrassing. Just wait until he wants to change the name and stop it from being an HBCU.
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What a complete and absolute joke of an organization.
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St. Trumpenstine’s Trumpiversity certainly has a ring to it
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Y’know, you gotta try something I guess.
For context, that agreement requires, among other things, that the participating colleges stop accepting so many minority students. So not really sure how that would work here.
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It doesn’t say that colleges should stop accepting so many minority students. The article says:
The compact…explicitly bars consideration of race, ethnicity and other identity-based characteristics for admissions and scholarship decisions”.
So, tough to do for an HBCU since the primary focus is to serve the historically underserved black community. Just wanted to be clear that the directive isn’t “accept less minorities”. It would essentially be scrubbing the identity sections out of the admissions/scholarship process.