An HBCU-Based Educational Approach for Black College Student Success, by Andrew Arroyo & Marybeth Gasman

Historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) are unique to America. In fact, they are America’s first minority-serving institutions (MSIs). At 105 in total number, they far eclipse the scope and effectiveness of any similar subset of institutions globally. Operating in their earliest forms since the mid 1800s, and then formalized under the Higher Education Act of 1965 (as amended), these schools have produced millions of successful graduates. Along the way, they also have spurred debates about America’s need for various kinds of MSIs to better serve Blacks, Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and White students who seek a more diverse educational experience. However, despite all the important attention HBCUs receive and the good they deliver, one aspect of these schools has been overlooked: their potential to serve as non-Eurocentric institutional models for student success in a system dominated by Eurocentric institutional models.

We address this discrepancy in an article entitled, “An HBCU-Based Educational Approach for Black College Student Success: Toward a Framework with Implications for All Institutions,” published in the American Journal of Education. We began developing the model in 2009 when we realized nothing of its kind existed and that there was a great need. We hope to see tests and revisions of the model as other researchers and practitioners begin using it; however, we will not use this space to discuss theory building. Instead, we want to highlight the model’s main premise: that HBCUs contain important non-Eurocentric institutional lessons for all colleges and universities whose mission involves Black student success. We address three questions—why non-Eurocentric?, why institutional?, and why HBCUs?—and then we offer some thoughts about using the model.

HBCUs contain important non-Eurocentric institutional lessons for all colleges and universities whose mission involves Black student success.

Why non-Eurocentric? This is a good question since America is ostensibly a Western nation. However, apart from a strong moral argument that inclusivity is important, the practical reality is that some American citizens exist between two worlds. W.E.B. Du Bois captured this challenging reality in his classic 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk with words such as “two-ness” and “double consciousness” that continue to speak to many African Americans over a century later. While existing in America, many African Americans maintain a subculture of non-Eurocentric norms (e.g., collectivism; interdependence). Notions of racial uplift, empowered by a collective lift-as-you-climb outlook, tend to inform the institutional cultures of many historically Black organizations, such as HBCUs. Thus, a model based on these schools provides an important foil to the Eurocentric world of American higher education, where the power and the narrative tend to be consolidated in the hands of Whites. Although educational research literature has made some significant strides toward providing a voice for marginalized individuals such as Black students and faculty, the niche area of institutional theory is still profoundly Eurocentric.

Why institutional? To be clear, our institutional focus does not remove student responsibility. As former students and now as faculty members with classrooms of our own, we are the first to emphasize students’ roles in their own success. Higher education can be a lonely, competitive endeavor, where individuals are faced with daily forks in the road: Will I read or not? Will I attend class or not? Will I seek help when I am struggling… or not? Yet, in our view, we cannot allow individual duty to mask a corresponding institutional responsibility in the student success equation. Recalling our own institutional experiences, many of us can cite a negative experience with an instructor. His or her incompetence, lack of enthusiasm, or approach to teaching created an uncomfortable learning environment for us, resulting in lower scores than we could have achieved under another instructor. Some of us also have experiences enrolling in, and later transferring from, a particular school because we generally did not fit. Given these scenarios, which show institutional influences on student success, a focus on institutional responsibility is just plain common sense.

Why HBCUs? In seeking to develop an alternative institutional model grounded in non-Eurocentric ideals, we argue that HBCUs are a natural source—despite being overlooked by institutional theorists who tend to choose historically White institutions (HWIs) as sites for model building. Decades of HBCU-based research by scholars has provided us with ample insights into special ways HBCUs contribute to student success overall, and Black student success in particular, so collecting insights from HWIs for a model designed for Black students is as unnecessary as it is counterproductive. Moreover, the unique contribution of our model is not in producing any revolutionary insights, but rather in conceptualizing a synthesis of insights in a way no prior work has, which provides a foundation for further groundbreaking research and practice. Thus, readers of our model who are familiar with (a) the relative accessibility of HBCUs and the role they play in educating highly prepared and underprepared students side by side, (b) their supportive environment for students, and (c) the non-Eurocentric “hidden curriculum” that blends traditional academic achievement with identity formation and the cultivation of values, will find themselves in familiar territory with the institutional picture this model describes. Now, however, they will have these insights assembled in one place, modeled in a conceptual figure, and ready as a framework or lens to use in their own research and practice.

Uses for this model are limited only by the imagination. It has the ability to facilitate the largest research project since Jacqueline Fleming’s seminal Blacks in College study, or smaller case studies involving single institutions. It can be used as a basis for administrator, faculty, and staff development, to educate and remind these stakeholders that they must do more than foster academic achievement through independent work, competition, and “book knowledge.” They must consider their role in providing a holistic education that includes identity formation and the cultivation of a non-Eurocentric values system.