Today in the New York Times, Elie Mystal of the influential Above The Law blog has an Op-Ed about HBCUs and For-Profit Law Schools. It is in response to news that broke late last week about historically black Bethune Cookman partnering with for-profit Arizona Summit Law School to offer Bethune Cookman students special admission.
Mystal says it is a con.
I wrote a book, called “Lower Ed”. In it I include a discussion of how professional and graduate programs at for-profit colleges — including those owned by for-profit InfiLaw, such as Arizona Summit Law School — are underexplored in public debate about for-profit colleges (See Chapters 1 and 5).
This is problem when we talk about black students in particular. For-profit colleges are now top producers of black students with advanced degrees. Any discussion about how black people, especially black women, are closing the education gap that doesn’t discuss the role of high-risk, high-cost for-profit colleges is missing more than half the story. I can’t get excited about black achievement when it comes at the expense associated with Lower Ed.
But, the question is why would a historically black college embrace this kind of partnership? Well, I also talk about that in Lower Ed (sorry!). The education gospel is powerful for us all. But, for black folks it is all-consuming. We won our freedom through education. We defined our citizenship through access to schooling. Black people have no language for high-risk schooling because racism has made all schooling high risk for black people.
Lower Ed benefits when systematic racism excludes black students from high quality schooling, networks that provide access to high quality jobs, and public policy that marks black people as criminal and inferior.
HBCUs have been uniquely charged with remediating the effects of all that racism. And it is hard. It has always been hard but it is especially hard in the new economy. HBCUs are much like the black students who rely on them — constrained by the education gospel and the structural racism that makes it near impossible for black people to achieve it by any means other than Lower Ed.
It’s a tough row to hoe as my great grandma used to say.