For more than 130 years, North Carolina A&T State University has quietly been doing its work of producing excellent engineers, business and health professionals and educators.
“A&T has been quietly doing this, all along, throughout the decades, producing outstanding graduates,” emphasizes Harold Martin, the current chancellor at A&T. And he should know: he is also an A&T alumnus, earning his degree in electrical engineering in 1974, before continuing on to earn a PhD in, “double E,” from Virginia Tech. After a stint as chancellor at Winston-Salem State, Martin was Senior Vice President of Academic Affairs for the UNC system, a position from which he could see the challenges the HBCUs within the system were dealing with.
For decades – pretty much, forever – the HBCUs within the UNC system have been underfunded. A&T’s chief financial officer, Robert Pompey has seen it, too.
“Oftentimes, it’s the person you have who’s representing you,” notes Pompey, who has been at A&T for 15 years after working at Wake Forest University. “So, if you have a general assembly or if you have a house and a senate and it is significantly comprised of graduates of your institution or are consistent supporters of your institution, there is going to be a difference in where funding is going.”
A&T is now benefitting from the HBCU Transformation Project, spearheaded by the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, named for the famous civil rights attorney and Supreme Court justice. Although Marshall didn’t attend North Carolina A&T, he did attend two HBCUs (Lincoln University and Howard). But it would be hard to do any major HBCU project without A&T at the head of it.
“We are graduating the nation’s largest number of African-American graduates out of our critical colleges than any university in America,” says Martin. “The exciting part is, we’re producing graduates in critical areas of national need: STEM, health sciences, teacher education.”
And plenty of them. At 13,500, this year’s A&T student body is the largest at any HBCU in history. And they cover the globe – this year’s student body at A&T comes from 48 US states and 100 different countries.
But A&T realizes, there will be challenges keeping that student body number.
“Within the state of North Carolina, the number of high school graduates will decline,” says Pompey. (The HBCU Transformation Project) “is going to allow us to reduce our reliance on that traditional 18 – 22-year-old population from the state of North Carolina and really explore our opportunities to enhance our tuition revenue and our growth, otherwise,” as they ramp up their online programs to attract students from every corner of the globe.
“This investment is a big deal, to help these institutions – all of us – catch up with the demand, today, of growth and expectations for our institutions,” says Chancellor Martin.
See more on the HBCU Transformation Project in this edition of the Buckley Report.
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