Jacksonville.com July 5, 2010 Jacksonville's EWC, other black colleges seek to rebrand themselves to stay alive By Matt Coleman, Topher Sanders They all want to be something different when they grow up. There's a lawyer. A police officer. A doctor. A chef. One even wants to be a professional basketball player - or an architect, if that growth spurt never kicks in. Nat Glover locked eyes with each of them. The seven teens were on the Edward Waters College campus in Northwest Jacksonville during a meeting of the Black Males College Explorer Program, a school dropout prevention group. Glover, the city's former sheriff and current interim president of Edward Waters, seized the opportunity to talk to them about making their dreams reality. "You want the fancy car, the big house, the wad of money in your pocket? Well, you need something up here," Glover said, pointing a ringed finger at his head. "You know how you get that? College. I expect to see y'all back here so I can hear about your college plans." If one of those students returns to the group with a newfound interest in his studies, Glover considers his mission accomplished. But it goes deeper than that. Getting the students to stay in school is good. Getting them into college is better. Getting them enrolled at Edward Waters is the goal. In 1920, there were 217 historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) like Edward Waters nationwide. Now there are 105 in 20 states, primarily in the South, and many are wrestling with slim budgets and enrollment drop-offs. The key to survival, some college administrators and academics say, is for struggling black colleges like Edward Waters to rebrand themselves. The more successful schools have trademark programs that set them apart from the pack. Florida A&M University in Tallahassee, for instance, has a prominent pharmacy school that has helped place it among the upper echelon of black colleges. Schools that haven't identified a strong niche program, like Edward Waters, have had difficulty marketing themselves to prospective scholars. That's why Glover told The Times-Union he's working with his staff to identify a possible Edward Waters signature. He understands the gravity of his decision. And he hopes his legacy at Edward Waters includes the establishment of an institutional trademark. "It's simple. Students need a reason to go here, and I'm aiming to give it to them," he said. "We want a program here that makes people say, 'Hey, Edward Waters is the place to go.'" The college linchpin Black colleges used to be the only higher education option for African-American youths. But white colleges and universities eventually opened their doors, and the advent of community colleges and for-profit schools promoted open access for increasing numbers of students. At Edward Waters, additional problems have resulted from decades of instability and scandal. Enrollment plunged after institutional plagiarism in 2004 that nearly stripped the school of its accreditation. The beleaguered college has had difficulty repairing its community image, leading to fundraising woes and consistent budget deficits. Marybeth Gasman, a University of Pennsylvania professor who researches national trends at black colleges, said many of those issues could be fixed with an institutional makeover. The first step would be to carve out a niche for the school to help differentiate it from rival colleges. If a school establishes itself as a leader in a one field, she said potential donors and interested students will line up. "It's the linchpin for every HBCU," Gasman said. "When you think of the best HBCUs, each one of them is leading the pack in a certain area. They might not be amazing at everything, but they're very good at a few things." FAMU is one of the most obvious examples of a black college that made early strides to brand itself as more than just a solid liberal arts institution. The public university is the largest black college in the country with about 12,000 students, and its pharmacy program is a national powerhouse. About 20 percent of the nation's African-American pharmacists are FAMU alumni. It's a model Glover would like to emulate in Jacksonville. He said Jacksonville could use a strong local criminal justice program, and he's considering that as a possible niche for Edward Waters to fill. That's why each of the inquisitive youths that listened to Glover's sales pitch is a potential lifeline for the college. If Edward Waters establishes a top-tier criminology department, Glover said maybe that student who wants to be a police officer will attend college locally. "The survival of Edward Waters depends on the student," he said. "It all comes and goes with them. Enrollment is the key to turning things around." Tough times Getting the students in the door, however, is no easy task. The problems at Edward Waters are symptomatic of other issues plaguing the HBCU model. Black colleges have been hit with a wave of bad press this decade, such as the much publicized fight between the Georgia O'Keeffe estate and Tennessee's Fisk University over the sale of donated O'Keeffe art, or the mismanagement at Morris Brown College that resulted in the school losing its accreditation in 2002 and its enrollment dropping from 2,500 to about 100 students this past year. They have also struggled to attract and retain the brightest employees in financial bookkeeping and management because the schools are competing with better salaries and benefits offered by larger universities and corporations, said James Ammons, president of FAMU. "When you look at the general HBCU community, that has been a struggle because at the end of the day everybody wants top talent," Ammons said. "It all comes back to financial resources." U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a June speech black colleges must also improve their graduation rates in order to help meet President Barack Obama's goal of increasing the nation's college degree attainment rate from 40 percent to 60 percent by 2020. Part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which was passed in 2009, is devoted to achieving those goals. The government estimates nearly 60,000 additional Pell Grant awards - need-based financial aid packages - will be issued to African-American students during the next decade. About 21,000 of those awards will go to students at HBCUs. Duncan said that funding is necessary to help buoy flagging black colleges, which enroll many lower-income, first-time college students who require financial aid and robust institutional support to succeed. It's the role the schools were designed to fill when they were created. It's why some scholars feel the schools will survive despite the adversity. HBCU evolution HBCUs thrived for decades thanks to steady enrollment from students who were barred from majority schools because of their skin color. But open access altered that forever, and the schools began retooling their images. John Wilson, executive director of the White House Initiative on HBCUs, said that's where the signature programs factor in. Black colleges require an academic trademark to attract talented students. "You need areas of depth where you are obviously competitive and hopefully world-class," Wilson said. "If you can look at Edwards Waters College or other colleges and not really be able to tell what they're especially good at, that's a challenge for the college." Ammons said FAMU's bustling pharmacy program has helped the school establish a solid reputation that helped it weather probation in 2007 for financial mismanagement. The program also injects a steady stream of new pharmacy scholars into the general student population every year. "When people talk about FAMU, pharmacy is one of the programs that they talk about," Ammons said. "Clearly it gives us a competitive edge. If the historically black colleges and universities are not given the opportunity to implement those signature programs, the struggles are going to continue." Kelley Evans, 23, a second-year pharmacy student at FAMU and a 2005 graduate of Orange Park High, attended Florida State College at Jacksonville before enrolling in FAMU's program. She felt EWC has to do more promotion. "UNF and [FSCJ] were publicized and you knew more about them in the community than EWC," Evans said after one of her pharmacy classes last week. "EWC could have been an option, but I didn't know much about it." Other schools are more successful. Administrators at Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona Beach said the school's nursing program has been thriving in the past few years because of increased marketing. College recruiters have pushed the program heavily to prospective students, and the nursing directors have cultivated a strong internship commitment with nearby Halifax-Health Medical Center. (A school spokeswoman said internship placement data wasn't available.) Other schools have transformed institutional dominance in specific academic niches into booming endowments. Xavier University of Louisiana leveraged the strength of its physical sciences programs to establish an endowment of about $100 million. The school regularly leads the country in the placement of African-American students into medical school. 'Making a change' Edwards Waters, on the other hand, is a smaller school than most of the powerhouse black colleges. But enrollment typically follows success, and the institution has no discernible trademark program. The school has pared down its course offerings to the bare essentials of a liberal arts college to keep costs low, and many of the faculty members are adjunct professors. That's why Glover said he's prepared to shake things up. He's honed in on a few areas that could be the school's ticket to regional prominence. He said Edward Waters has tried for years to link up with the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office or other law enforcement agencies to bring a criminology lab to campus, and his contacts from his days as sheriff could help make that a reality. His other vision is to use Jacksonville's own transportation infrastructure, which includes ports, buses and the airport, to help create a niche in transportation technology and logistics. There is one shared thread between the signature programs he's brainstorming - they're all intrinsically linked to Jacksonville. Edward Waters is a historic part of the city, and he said the school needs to show the community its worth before it can expect a turnaround. He believes a signature program is the vehicle to improving the school's profile. "I'm dedicated to making a change, and if we want to get better, we need to show that we've gotten better at something," he said. "If we can educate [students] to be the best in one area, then we can find a way to boost enrollment and fundraising, and gain a better reputation across the state and across the country." SANDRA M. PHOENIX Program Director HBCU Library Alliance sphoenix@hbculibraries.org<mailto:sphoenix@hbculibraries.org> www.hbculibraries.org<http://www.hbculibraries.org/> 404.592.4820 1438 West Peachtree Street NW Suite 200 Atlanta, GA 30309 Toll Free: 1.800.999.8558 (Lyrasis) Fax: 404.892.7879 www.lyrasis.org<http://www.lyrasis.org/> Honor the ancestors, honor the children. Register now http://www.hbculibraries.org/html/meeting-form.html for the October 24-26, 2010 HBCU Library Alliance 4th Membership Meeting and the "Conference on Advocacy" pre-conference in Montgomery, AL. The Pre-Conference and Membership meeting are open to directors and other librarians.