Small universities are expensive to run & expensive to attend, and without enormous endowments they usually lack the experiences and tools of larger universities, and particularly large public universities that get public funding.
The troubles with St. Aug. have been going on for a long time and it’s not getting better. It’s like having a patient on life support that has no chance of recovery and is only being kept alive because family members can’t let the person go.
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I’ve always thought that the St Aug’s campus would be a great tech company campus and they could lease back a few buildings on the campus for the university. Probably not realistic but it would be a solution.
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If the university folds, and they have to liquidate their assets, that property would instantly become the hottest RE site available in the city. My hope would be that it would not just be housing, rather a mix of uses to include lots of housing but also walkable resources and assets for the residential communities that surround it on all sides.
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I wasn’t saying it’s only black students, just that it lacks diversity, which could be a contributing cause for prospective students to look elsewhere. And maybe it’s not, I don’t really know. It’s been a long time since I was looking at colleges.
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I don’t know how you get past the issue of any new construction on that site and the shadows it would cast on part of a house somewhere in Oakwood.
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Yeah I figured that’s what you meant, it’s primarily due to the public perception of these institutions. NCAT, NCCU and others have multiple partnerships with diverse community colleges and universities, including international universities, along with scholarships for low-income non-poc but many people aren’t aware of this or care.
The majority of Americans including AA look down on these schools for many reasons involving racial prejudice along with somewhat valid arguments about safety or credibility (varies and depends on the school).
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I think you’re probably correct and that seems like the most likely scenario, but I feel icky rooting for an HBCU to fail, so I’ll be sitting this one out
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I think the reality at this point is that it isn’t rooting for them to fail - they have already failed. They consistently haven’t met payroll recently and owe the IRS over $7m. It has been so badly mismanaged there’s probably no light at the end of this tunnel. No students will trust them at this point.
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This part of the WRAL article I shared is the most concerning. That’s a lot of missing money. Where did it go?
On Tuesday, WRAL News obtained fiscal year 2021 audit documents from a Saint Augustine’s University source.
They read in part, “Unapproved cash disbursements… along with the overall lack of internal controls and accounting practices… resulted in over $10 million of cash disbursements that were unsupportable and were not apparently recorded in the general ledger.”
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That can all be true and I can still feel bad about it
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While I empathize with your feelings, the only people that should feel bad are the folks in charge of managing St. Augustine’s who have so clearly failed their employees and students.
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The sad part is the majority of the employees are no longer with St. Augustine’s
Agree in principle but apart from a few hundred elite colleges and universities with national appeal, most higher ed institutions draw locally and regionally and shouldn’t be expected to mirror the demographics of the country as a whole. U of South Dakota isn’t very diverse either. HBCUs are mostly located in underserved urban areas that were (and still are) primarily black. So they fill an important niche. Fayetteville State is an HBCU and the only comprehensive university in that metro – so its demographics approximate the community it serves. But St. Aug is harder to justify because the Triangle is already pretty saturated and a non-elite small liberal arts college without many research-active faculty is an increasingly tough sell.
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Corruption at its finest. No credible system of checks and balances equals no accountability. Someone or some people had too much power. I do feel bad for all of the innocent students and staff members that were oblivious to this. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
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What if they merged with Peace and Shaw to form a superschool?
Would be an ‘acquisition’…not a merger. William Peace buys the asset; maybe agrees to offer the current students degrees provided they complete their coursework. A reasonable person could argue Peace could educate a greater number of African -American students than SA is capable of doing. After that, its “William Peace University”.
Odds of this occurring ‘naturally’ I give a virtual ZERO. There are too many unreasonable & unrealistic SA ‘board members’. When the tax agencies & creditors file liens or seize the asset, in order for the taxpayer to be kept whole…it must sell for the highest price.
Why would Peace or Shaw want to take on their problems?
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Just looked it up on iMaps and the university’s land alone is worth more than their endowment.
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if it was just a satellite campus of a nearby state university(s)…perhaps with a just a few speicalties based on its size? NCCU-DTR, social services and lagal campus, etc? outside side of that, raze and redevelop?
This is not looking good for St. Augs. Sending all students home for remote learning starting in April
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