Merge Historically Black Colleges With White?

[sneezypb]

Retention is one of those numbers higher education leaders tend to review to determine how effectively the faculty reaches the students. Historically black colleges and universities were created because students found it difficult both to get into "neutral" colleges and graduate from them. That latter part sounds like they were created in part to

Comments

[aya1081]

screw seth harp is what i say!

[sneezypb]

Shhhhh... Don't make his staff people read this.

[elmakr]

The education system in Holland went through a phase about ten years ago when mergers were all the rage. Smaller schools merged and turned into huge institutions with 30000+ students- I guess the idea was that a centralized administration would make the schools more effective and that procedures, rules etc. would be standardized. Also, bigger schools can afford to offer a wider range of programs, which is theoretically a really good idea. Unfortunately the merged schools had a tendency to turn into complete monoliths where no one understood what happened where in the organisation. Getting a simple question answered can require ten phone calls to ten different offices because no one is sure who knows what. I hope Georgia isn't going to try and re-invent the wheel on this, esp. since the wheel turned out to be kinda square.

[sneezypb]

I really don't think improving the quality of education is the consideration here. All the school under consideration here are part of the University System of Georgia, so they already have the standardization while being somewhat independent.

I can't imagine either school in the mashup opportunities discussed are so large they could absorb the other without needing major capital expenditures to build or operate multiple campuses. Each has grown by 20-90% in the last decade http://www.usg.edu/research/students/enroll/10yr/rpt98-07.pdf and greatly use the online system my organization provides which usually is a sign of a lack of classroom space. Having to spend a ton of money to merge the schools under these conditions doesn't save money.