Shaw just announced a $1 million gift from a family of alumni. Altogether during Homecoming Week the school has raised $1.7 million.
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That is a nice chunk of change for nearly any college/university. Someone put their Shaw degree to good use!!
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That may pay the heating and gas bill for about a year.
I drive by daily. I own property very close by and I can assure you the campus has NOT enhanced the value of my property.
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I’m not here to argue or debate you. Perhaps you should move if you are so disgusted by the school then. What’s keeping you living near a HBCU? Can you afford to move or no? You sound miserable and life’s too short to live in a place you aren’t happy to be living, sir. I know a good realtor if you’re serious about moving.
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I don’t live there but I am an investor and the purpose of this site is to discuss the advancement of Downtown Raleigh. St Aug is not helping with that advancement. You may not like the way it sounds. You may want to political-correctly sugar coat some rationale around SA’s continued existence.
I have friends who work there; who have taught there over the years, and I can tell you with certainty they are hanging by a thread. They don’t have enough money and it is obvious when you look at the overall condition of the campus. Hell, they couldn’t even pay the private security company that was supposed to provide campus protection…so they quit. Compare it to William-Peace a few blocks away as an example. See a difference?
Can you tell me what’s so great about their campus? You have one stone building that is braced by steel beams because they can’t afford to restore it. They want someone else to pay for it but they keep control of the decision making of how its used…hence why nobody will provide funding. The student housing looks borderline old public housing. The school is struggling plain and simple and its decay spills over. I would love for St. Aug to be Moorehouse or Howard…but it’s not.
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It is definitely totally normal and not at all weird to develop a strong opinion about whether a university “deserves” to continue to exist by looking at it exclusively through the lens of how it affects your property values personally. This is totally how reasonable, non-sociopathic people approach these things.
I couldn’t help but notice that you also pooh-poohed the sizable donation to Shaw as well. Do you own property in that area whose value is being unjustly repressed by Shaw as well, or do you just sometimes like to treat the two schools like they’re all one school?
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It’s not a sizable donation by almost any standard. Duke recently raised 3.85 billion dollars for Empower Duke. UNC CH is set to raise 4.25 billion by 2022 ( already over 2 billion). They probably need to raise at least a few hundred million to get anything reasonable done.
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as I said, for nearly any…
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My dorms looked like public housing as well. No one is trying to say their campus is anything special but you seem to be tying their right to exist to your property value which is absurd.
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Mine did too. And I was in heaven at App State. But today’s standards are so much higher. I digress.
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Look, the bleeding heart in me wants this University to succeed and be more like NCCU or Davidson or even just William Peace. The realist in me realizes that universities like Shaw exist on charging student a lot of money, who have to take out student loans, for what turns out to be a worthless, in most cases, degree.
If Shaw or St. Augustine can become successful it is great for DTR, but realistically they should close, or combine, or something.
I know that opinion is harsh, and I hate that it would have to happen, because i think a successful downtown University is a great thing and adds tremendous value, but I just don’t see it happening.
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I thought I won the lottery because my dorm at App had shower stalls instead of a gang shower! Students today don’t want to share a bathroom with a suite, much less a whole floor. Standards certainly have changed, and for the more expensive. Man, I do love a good digression, lol.
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My disagreement with you is about the degree being worthless. I have hired a few people with Shaw degrees and they did very well.
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I never had the full college experience of living in a dorm. I jumped straight to living in dilapidated, old houses where 5 guys shared a tiny bathroom, the house was heated by an oil furnace and there were roaches everywhere.
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Roaches and squalor build character.
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Sounds pretty authentic to me. Reminds me of my last year at Carolina.
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I said in most cases, I made sure to say that. College is what you make of it, and whether it is Shaw, St. Augustine, Duke or Harvard, it all depends on the degree. Shaw has a 25% grad rate, St. Augustine has a 39% grad rate. That is a huge percentage of students spending money and gaining nothing from it. I don’t know job placement or grad school placement after graduation, but given other schools with similar stats I can’t imagine it is great.
Again, this is not a slight against these specific schools. I think there is a large glut of higher education, and slimming down the options would be beneficial to all parties.
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