Higher Ed Accountability: The Associated Press and Historically Black Colleges, April 28, 2009
Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Stories That Work: The Associated Press and Historically Black Colleges

Stories That Work: The Associated Press and Historically Black Colleges

Historically black colleges and universities have long enjoyed the reputation that compared to majority-white schools, they do better by African American students. If that were the case, Justin Pope wondered, then why do so many HBCUs consistently wind up at the bottom of lists of college graduation rates?

Justin, the Associated Press’s national higher education reporter, had long thought college completion—or lack thereof—was an important, underreported story. At the same time, he felt like the press wrote little about HBCUs. “They kind of exist in this bubble, separated from both positive stories and accountability stories,” he told me. So Justin began poking around on the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, or IPEDS, the federal government’s higher ed statistics database, to find out the truth about HBCUs and graduation.

“IPEDS is an incredible resource, but you have to know how to use it,” Justin said. He soon found out that he didn’t. Sure, he could create a list of schools and retrieve certain types of data for them; it was far more complicated, however, to measure and compare graduation rates from school to school, and from group (HBCUs) to group (all schools). And he was asking a question that hadn’t been asked before, rather than relying on research that already existed—terrific journalism, without shortcuts.

In short, overwhelming.

Justin eventually realized that on his own he wouldn’t achieve the flawless methodology he wanted. He sought help from researchers at Education Trust, which tracks graduation rates with its own web tool, to mine IPEDS for data more current than what their organization had posted. Pride of ownership, he says now, should not stop a reporter from asking for this kind of help, and he only wishes he had done so earlier.

What he ultimately found out, and reported in his March 28 piece: 37 percent of black students at HBCUs graduate within six years, compared to 41 percent of blacks nationally. For black men at HBCUs, the story is worse: 29 percent of them graduate within six years.

“This is a tight-knit community of people, and this group of schools plays a very proud and important role in the tapestry of American higher education,” Justin told me. Given the emotional and historical importance of HBCUs, he faced some resistance to his reporting.

There are complex explanations of how this problem came to be, he was told. (He did a great job of addressing this in the story; the blame is shared widely.) You can’t look at HBCUs as a group because they are so different from each other, he was told. (Well, he said, other types of colleges are diverse, yet we compare them all the time.) Our research shows otherwise, one organization said. (Justin was so thorough with the data analysis that he felt comfortable favoring his own methodology.) He also challenged himself, asking if it was the right time to dive into such an exhaustive story that wasn’t about the economy. Yes, he decided. “I don’t think we can just stop covering other things that are going on in education,” he said.

Of course, like most stories about college, in many ways this one is about the economy too. Data in Justin’s piece, beyond graduation rates, show how. At some HBCUs, per-student spending on teaching and support is as low as $5,000, compared to $23,000 at Howard and $102,000 at Yale—and even that little funding is now at risk. (This astonishing gap is far bigger than in K-12 education and is a ripe topic for stories, Justin points out. Check IPEDS for more.) $94,000? The debt one Florida A&M student racked up in three years before dropping out.

This dropout, Brandon Rossi, only gets two grafs in the story, but it’s enough to get a feel for his plight. So far in the hole for an incomplete education? Which brings me to an important point: You can’t write about dropouts without talking to dropouts. And, unfortunately, they don’t tend to hang out on the quad, waiting to be interviewed by reporters.

“There were some moments in the reporting of this where I thought, ‘Boy, I am writing this story essentially about how many black males dropped out, and I can’t find any,” Justin said. He asked people he interviewed for the names and numbers of dropouts; that didn’t get him anywhere. He found luck posting queries on HBCU community websites.

Justin was worried he’d be vulnerable to criticism that, writing about a group of schools with hundreds of thousands of students among them, he couldn’t possibly understand all the nuances involved. In my eyes, including the voices of so many people—who were loyal to their schools yet clearly dissatisfied—headed off such criticism. The story was solidly based in data, but Justin interviewed widely and stretched to show what the numbers meant in real life—particularly compellingly, he wrote about how the lack of men on campus made it hard for women to find dates, and how it led them to tolerate poor treatment from boyfriends.

Justin said that most of the HBCU presidents were open and honest about the problems, but his story benefited from the blunt observations of one in particular, Walter Kimbrough at Philander Smith College in Little Rock, Ark. Kimbrough said HBCUs “have gotten lazy” and called the idea of them as an unusually nurturing environment a “flat-out lie.” He had been described to Justin as part of a new generation of HBCU leaders committed to raising academic standards. This, Justin told me, reflects a conflict playing out at many schools around the country, one worth writing about if you cover HBCUs: Can you continue a mission of open access at the same time you improve academics and graduation rates?

Justin began playing around with the data in January, while he reported other stories. In February he wrote two pieces, one on the gender gap and one on the graduation rate, which were eventually combined into one article of about 3,000 words—“because they are inextricably connected,” he said. He also wrote an abridged version that ran most commonly.

While the piece took a lot of time, Justin, who works in the AP’s Raleigh, N.C., bureau, said his expenses probably only came to $40. He did almost all of his reporting by phone, except for a detour on his own time to LeMoyne-Owen College, during a family trip to Memphis. An AP colleague in Atlanta conducted some interviews there.

Justin’s article touched on so many issues that in and of themselves could be 3,000-word pieces: the massive gender gap at colleges, the challenges of arriving unprepared, enrollment loss due in part to the economy, the spending disparities. Come to think of it, they could be 600-word pieces too. So take a look and grab some ideas.

Linda Perlstein is available to help you. Contact her at 410-539-2464 or
lperlstein@ewa.org.

PS. Reporters can get lessons on how to use IPEDS at the EWA National Seminar at 3:45 p.m. on Thursday, April 30.