Changing Face of Historically Black Colleges

May 19, 2008 — -- Two things set Joshua Packwood apart from his 520 other classmates who graduated Sunday from Morehouse College -- his GPA and his race.

Packwood is the first white valedictorian in the 141-year history of the Atlanta college and the only white member of his class.

While Packwood was one of a handful of nonblack students at Morehouse, he is part of a greater trend toward diversifying historically black schools.

Faced with increased competition from historically white schools, and in some cases legal requirements to diversify their student bodies, historically black colleges and universities, or HBCUs, are actively recruiting white, Hispanic and Asian students.

Packwood, a 23-year-old economics major from Kansas City, Mo., earned a 4.0 grade point average and soon will begin work at Goldman Sachs, the New York-based investment firm.

He was offered a full ride to Columbia University but chose instead to attend Morehouse, the alma mater of Martin Luther King Jr., and the only remaining all-male historically black college in the United States.

"I've been forced to see the world in a different perspective that I don't think I could've gotten anywhere else," he told The Associated Press. "None of the Ivies, no matter how large their enrollment is, no matter how many Nobel laureates they have on their faculty … none of them could've provided me with the perspective I have now."

The National Center for Education Statistics tracked students, by race, attending historically black schools from 1976 to 2001 and recorded an increase in nonblack students attending the schools over that time.

In 1976, 9.5 percent of students were white. Twenty-five years later, in 2001, 12 percent of students enrolled at historically black institutions were white. Percentages of Hispanic students in that same time increased from 1.5 percent to 2.3 percent, and Asian/Pacific Islanders from 0.3 percent to 0.8 percent.

A total of about 285,000 students attend HBCUs every year.

The trend toward more diverse student bodies can be attributed to both black schools' active recruitment of nonblack students and incentives such as scholarships, smaller class sizes and cheaper tuitions than white schools, said Lezli Baskerville, president of the National Association of Equal Opportunity in Higher Education, an advocacy group for the country's 118 HBCUs.