
A Student-Debt Crisis Hits Hardest at Historically Black Colleges - megacorp
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-student-debt-crisis-hits-hardest-at-historically-black-colleges-11555511327
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bargl
I recently watched a vice video about how HBCUs are starting to accept more
people of other races. The rep from the college said it was purely for
financial reasons. It was a pretty good documentary.

Link to article (It has autoplay enabled).
[https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vbq8y9/white-student-
at-a...](https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vbq8y9/white-student-at-a-
historically-black-college-morehouse-atlanta)

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dominotw
lots of them are < 10% black per wikipedia.

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bargl
They mention that in the video. They are looking at colleges which don't fall
into that group.

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dominotw
Ah sorry. I got paywalled. now wondering if the conclusion would have changed
if they hadn't done the exclusion.

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hinkley
Reminds me of a biography I was reading (My Work Is That of Conservation: An
Environmental Biography of George Washington Carver). I was at a meeting about
diversity for a group I belong to. One of the people there was waxing poetic
about it.

Among other things, he bootstrapped the agriculture program at the Tuskegee
Institute in Alabama, at the invitation of Booker T Washington.

Carver was an exceptionally polite and religious man, the sort of person
racists could label as 'one of the good ones' and that helped grease some
wheels for him. He also a very clever and intuitive man who had a number
thoughts on ecology that are just being echoed in modern rethinking of
agricultural and land management practices, nearly a hundred years later. Way
ahead of his time (which did _not_ work in his favor). But I digress.

What he found when he moved to Alabama: after the Civil War, slaves were freed
but the land was still owned by the landed gentry. Everyone was 'free' but
they worked as sharecroppers, on second-rate farmland. They were also told
they couldn't plant certain things, like food for subsistence. So they were
constantly cycling debt loads every year buying food and supplies, waiting for
the crop to come in, keeping them constantly off balance. They also couldn't
afford the expensive equipment that was featured heavily in the Green
Revolution of the time. Speaking out against this earned him some enemies, and
if I recall a lot of friction with Washington.

Adam Conover, in an episode about diversity in suburbs, talks about many
things, but one that stuck out is higher interest rates for minorities,
keeping them out or less secure than their white counterparts (maybe a case of
racist algorithms?). The deck is still stacked.

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gringoDan
Reminds me of this story I read a few months back about one woman's experience
at Grambling State University:
[https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/a-college-degree-
mor...](https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/a-college-degree-more-than-
fifteen-years-in-the-making)

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hiei
Pay wall - outline.com doesn't seem to support the wsj domain.

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sctb
If someone has an alternate link for this story we can update it.

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oh_sigh
It would be cool if articles could be linked that were available to read.

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_iyig
Do you work for free? Should newspaper reporters?

I pay for access to the Wall Street Journal. If you are able to do so, and if
you value the type of content they produce on a regular basis, I would highly
recommend subscribing.

~~~
DoreenMichele
I'm actually someone who routinely criticizes the fact that current trends
(such as widespread use of ad blockers) are a de facto expectation of slave
labor on the part of writers.

But I also agree that articles should actually be accessible.

I don't know the solution, but (hard) paywalls de facto exclude a lot of
people. This is another serious issue.

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
The problem is everyone wants to charge a $10 to $20 monthly subscription. If
Netflix can fund billions in film production for $12 monthly why does a
newspaper need more?

