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The
head of the association says lower costs are not the
only thing the schools have to offer. Whites who attend
the schools are preparing for an "increasingly
black and brown world," said Lezli Baskerville,
the association's president and CEO.
"If
you want to know how to live in one, you can't grow
up in an all-white neighborhood, go to a predominantly
white school, white cultural and social events, go to
a predominantly white university and then thrive in
a world that is today more black, more brown than before,"
Baskerville said.
White
students say they've taken valuable experiences from
their time at black colleges. Skin color, the students
say, is much more of a factor away from the campuses
than it is on them.
"You
should get to know people based on who they are,"
Roberts said. "You can't judge a book by its cover."
The
first of what are now called historically black colleges
and universities was Cheyney University in Pennsylvania,
which was founded in 1837 so that blacks -- barred from
attending many traditional schools -- could get advanced
educations. Since then, more than 100 such institutions
have been established in the U.S. and about 285,000
students attend the schools each year.
Lawsuits
have forced many of the schools -- about half of them
are public -- to diversify their student bodies, Baskerville
said. In the 2005-06 school year, nearly 10 percent
of their students were white, according to her association's
data.
Scholarships,
new programs and recruitment have attracted dozens of
whites to schools such as South Carolina State University,
where they account for around 4 percent of the student
body, said university spokeswoman Erica Prioleau. The
school has a minority affairs office for white students,
similar to those found for non-white students at traditionally
white schools.
A
handful of whites attend Atlanta's private Morehouse
College. The school hasn't been aggressively recruiting
whites, so they make a "conscious decision"
to attend, said Sterling Hudson, dean of admissions
and records for the college.
Steven
Schukei did just that. The Morehouse alumnus, who now
works as a vice president in technology for New York-based
investment firm Goldman Sachs, said he gained a perspective
that he wasn't offered while growing up and going to
school in Nebraska, Colorado and South Carolina.
"There
was always this sort of disjoint between what I thought
I should be learning and what I actually did learn,"
said Schukei, 30. "And I thought Morehouse would
be an opportunity to expand my horizons and to see a
different perspective on the world that we live in."
Schukei
remembers Morehouse as a "refuge from the rest
of the world where what race you are doesn't really
matter."
"Conversations
that people typically wouldn't feel comfortable having
about race can happen on Morehouse's campus where they
just wouldn't happen anyplace else," he said.
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