May 14, 2015
Colleges in the Southeast Region—Part II For show notes including
links to all the colleges we mention, visit
http://nycollegechat.org/30 In our last episode, we continued our
virtual tour of colleges by focusing in on the six states in the
Southern Southeast region: Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama,
Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina. We looked at public
universities—both the flagship state public universities and other
public universities in those states. In this episode, we will
continue our look into the Southern Southeast states by switching
our focus to private colleges and universities. Again, we want to
make it clear that no college has asked us or paid us anything to
name it. These are entirely our own choices. Some of the colleges
we will spotlight in this episode will require that your child have
very good high school grades and college admission test scores to
get in. Others will be a bit easier, especially if a college is
looking for out-of-state students to enhance its student body’s
geographic diversity. Two general notes: First, when we talk about
the colleges and universities in this episode, we are going to be
talking about the main campus—that is, the one that most people
associate with that institution—in those cases where an institution
has more than one campus. Second, because enrollment figures are
not necessarily comparable as reported by various colleges, you
should use the figures we provide here just as an approximation of
the actual campus enrollment, but one that is good enough to help
you understand whether the student body is the right size for your
child—roughly, small, medium, or really huge. 1. Private Colleges
and Universities The Southern Southeast states have a wide array of
private higher education institutions—from small Bible colleges to
small liberal arts colleges to larger universities. Let’s start
with two private universities that most people have long considered
two of the best in the South and that also enjoy a great national
reputation: Emory University and Tulane University. Your child
would need very good high school grades and college admission test
scores to be admitted to either one. Emory is located in Atlanta,
Georgia, an impressive Southern city, which is the home of quite a
few higher education institutions, both public and private. Emory
is made up of nine undergraduate, graduate, and professional
schools and colleges and offers undergraduates a chance to study
the liberal arts and sciences, business, or nursing. It serves
about 8,000 undergraduates and about 7,000 graduate and
professional students. Emory has a unique program at its Oxford
College, the site of the original Emory campus before it was moved
to Atlanta. Oxford College now offers the first two years of a
liberal arts college program on its smaller, residential campus
east of Atlanta. Oxford “concentrates on the intellectual, social,
and developmental needs of first- and second-year students. Oxford
faculty are hired and promoted on the quality of their teaching and
community service. Classes are intimate, with much discussion and
interaction.” (Text taken from the website) After finishing the two
years at Oxford, students can join any of the undergraduate schools
on Emory’s Atlanta campus. What an interesting transition this is
to life on a big urban university campus. Founded by Georgia
Methodists, Emory also has an excellent graduate school of
theology. Turning to New Orleans, one of the true gems of the
South, let’s look at Tulane. Tulane has five undergraduate
schools—the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, the
School of Science and Engineering, the School of Architecture, the
A.B. Freeman School of Business, and the School of Liberal
Arts—plus graduate and professional schools for law, medicine, and
social work. Tulane enrolls about 8,000 undergraduates and about
5,000 graduate and professional students, drawn nationally and
internationally. It also has something that I know Marie is going
to love—the Newcomb College Institute, named for the original H.
Sophie Newcomb Memorial College, which opened as the women’s
college of Tulane in 1886. With its programming on women’s issues
available to the whole university community, the Institute has the
following mission: “To cultivate lifelong leadership among
undergraduate women; to empower women by integrating teaching,
research, and community engagement; to preserve, document, produce,
and disseminate knowledge about women; and to honor the memory of
H. Sophie Newcomb and carry forward the work of Newcomb College by
providing a woman-centered experience in a co-ed institution” (text
taken from the website). And did I say it was in New Orleans? No
better place to be. Let’s talk about one more private
university—the University of Miami, with about 11,000
undergraduates and 5,000 graduate and professional students, drawn
nationally and internationally. Located in suburban Coral Gables,
the University of Miami has a name that sounds as though it might
be public, but it is, in fact, private. It has grown in reputation
over the past decade and a half during the presidency of Donna
Shalala (who is resigning this year). Shalala was the former
president of Hunter College here in New York City, the Chancellor
of the University of Wisconsin–Madison (which we talked about in
this Great Lakes episode), the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human
Services under President Clinton, and, most importantly, my
professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, in 1975. The
Coral Gables Campus of the University of Miami houses two colleges
and seven schools, including the Frost School of Music, one of two
original schools when the University was founded in 1926. The
University’s Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science is
located in Biscayne Bay, and there is a separate Medical Campus,
which includes three hospitals. Undergraduates can earn degrees in
115 bachelor’s programs. A Look at Five Interesting Choices. As we
said in Episode 28, Colleges That Change Lives is a nonprofit
organization that was founded after the publication of the book
Colleges That Change Lives, by Loren Pope, a retired New York Times
education editor. There are now 44 colleges and universities
profiled in the book and on the organization’s website. Those that
are included are not necessarily famous institutions, but they all
care deeply about individual students and strive to make the
college into a community to support students. Many of the
institutions have engaging and experiential aspects to their
programs—such as internships, international and intercultural
programs, and service-learning projects. Most of the institutions
are smaller colleges and universities that have proved to be
successful at developing students both personally and academically
so that they can succeed in life after their undergraduate college
years. Five of the 44 institutions on the list are located in the
Southern Southeast states. You should read about them in the book
or on the website, because you will learn much more about them than
I can tell you here. Here are the five: In Alabama:
Birmingham–Southern College In Mississippi: Millsaps College In
Florida: New College of Florida and Eckerd College In Georgia:
Agnes Scott College New College of Florida, located in Sarasota, is
an interesting choice because it was founded as a private college
in 1960 and then joined the public State University System as part
of the University of South Florida in 1975. In 2001, it was
designated as the Honors College for the state of Florida. It
enrolls just 800 students from 40 states and 15 foreign countries.
Agnes Scott College, located in Decatur (right outside Atlanta), is
an interesting choice because it is one of the just over 40
remaining women’s colleges in the U.S. It enrolls about 900 women,
drawn from 36 states and 36 foreign countries. A liberal arts
college, it offers 34 majors. Because these institutions are
relatively small and thus are not particularly well known outside
of their geographic region, it is my feeling that out-of-state
students with a good high school record might have a decent chance
of being accepted. 2. Colleges with a Special Academic Focus In
episode 4 of NYCollegeChat, we talked about colleges that have a
special focus, whether it is an academic focus or a focus on
certain student populations or something else. In our last episode,
we spotlighted Georgia Tech, with its focus on technologically
based fields. Now let’s look at an institution with an arts focus,
and that is Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD), located in
Georgia’s prettiest town—and, I would argue, the prettiest town
almost anywhere. Founded relatively recently in 1978, SCAD offers
more than 40 undergraduate and graduate majors. The top five majors
in 2014 were animation, graphic design, illustration, fashion, and
film and television (though it also offers more traditional fine
arts majors, like painting, sculpture, photography, and even
writing). In the general education course requirements, students
take courses in the humanities and fine arts, natural sciences and
mathematics, social and behavioral sciences, written and oral
communication, and computer literacy. SCAD enrolls a total of about
11,000 students, drawn nationally and internationally (almost 25
percent of the student body is international). Its rolling
admissions process seems quite individualized, and portfolios will
be an important part of the application process for some programs.
A more unusual special focus among higher education institutions is
military service. In a much earlier episode of NYCollegeChat, we
talked about the U.S. military service academies: the United States
Naval Academy in Maryland (often referred to as Annapolis), the
United States Military Academy in New York (commonly referred to as
West Point), the Air Force Academy in Colorado, the United States
Coast Guard Academy in Connecticut, and the United States Merchant
Marine Academy in New York. But now let’s look at the Military
College of South Carolina, The Citadel, which is a public college
located in Charleston. Founded in 1842, The Citadel has about 2,300
undergraduates (about half from South Carolina), who make up the
South Carolina Corps of Cadets, and about 1,000 students in The
Citadel Graduate College, a civilian evening program, which also
offers undergraduate studies. As described on its website, “The men
and women in the Corps live and study under a classical military
system that makes leadership and character development an essential
part of the educational experience.” The Citadel offers 20
undergraduate majors—with mandatory leadership and ethics
studies—in the schools of business, education, engineering, science
and mathematics, and humanities and social sciences. About
one-third of graduating cadets are commissioned into military
service, mostly into the Army. A Look at Historically Black
Colleges and Universities. In Episode 4 in Series 1 of
NYCollegeChat, we talked about historically black colleges and
universities (commonly referred to as HBCUs), which were
established with the mission of educating African-American students
solely or primarily—that is, a mission of serving students who had
been excluded from many other higher education institutions because
of their race. You might recall that there are just over 100
HBCUs—public and private, rural and urban, large and small (even
very small), two-year and four-year and graduate schools. Many were
founded in the South shortly after the Civil War, and these HBCUs
share a proud history of becoming the first collegiate homes for
family members of freed slaves. As we explained in our earlier
episode, HBCUs today enroll students who are not black. Some people
say that it has become harder for HBCUs to recruit African-American
students, who are now welcome at both selective and nonselective
colleges across the U.S. Nonetheless, there is still a strong sense
of community among the alumni/alumnae of HBCUs and a strong sense
of tradition and shared culture on HBCU campuses. As it turns out,
a large number of HBCUs are located in the six Southern Southeast
states—about 35 four-year HBCUs, plus the only HBCU public system,
the Southern University and A & M College System in Louisiana, with
campuses in Baton Rouge, Shreveport, and New Orleans. Southern
University’s main campus in Baton Rouge enrolls about 6,000
undergraduates and 1,000 graduate and professional students, with
another approximately 3,000 undergraduates at each of the New
Orleans and Shreveport campuses. In Baton Rouge, undergraduate
students can study in 34 majors across six colleges, including the
College of Sciences and Agriculture and the College of Engineering
and Computer Science, as befits an A & M (agricultural and
mechanical) university. Also in Louisiana is Xavier University of
Louisiana, the only Catholic HBCU, which offers about 3,000
undergraduate, graduate, and professional students a choice of 46
majors. Xavier was founded as a high school by Sister Katharine
Drexel and her Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, a religious
community dedicated to the education of African Americans and
Native Americans. The college program was added in 1925. One of the
most famous HBCUs is Tuskegee University, founded in Alabama in
1881 by Booker T. Washington, who was the institution’s first
teacher and its head until his death in 1915. Booker T. Washington
brought George Washington Carver to Tuskegee to head its
agricultural studies, and it was at Tuskegee that Carver did his
work on peanuts and sweet potatoes and mobile classrooms to educate
farmers and more. Both Washington and Carver are buried on Tuskegee
grounds. Now serving about 3,000 students in seven schools and
colleges, Tuskegee is the only HBCU to award a doctoral degree in
veterinary medicine (from its College of Veterinary Medicine,
Nursing & Allied Health), and it is the only college campus to be
designated a National Historic Site by the U.S. Congress. We find
two well-known and highly respected HBCUs in Atlanta: the
all-female Spelman College and the all-male Morehouse College, both
founded by Baptist leaders. Spelman is a liberal arts college that
offers 27 majors to just over 2,000 undergraduate women, drawn from
most states (with New York as one of the top five states sending
students to Spelman). It has an enviable student to faculty ratio
of 10:1, meaning that students should typically be in small classes
and get close attention from faculty members. Morehouse enrolls
about 2,500 undergraduate men and offers 26 majors across three
liberal arts and sciences academic divisions. Students are required
to complete a core curriculum, which includes four courses in the
humanities—one in religion, one in philosophy, one in art history,
and one in music history. Morehouse has a roster of famous alumni,
ranging from Martin Luther King, Jr., to Samuel L. Jackson and
Spike Lee. Both Spelman and Morehouse have especially strong senses
of tradition and pride in their college communities and among their
alumni/alumnae. If you are interested in an HBCU for your child,
the Southern Southeast region is a particularly fertile spot to
find one. There are 30 more in this region that you can read about
on your own. Just search for the White House Initiative on HBCUs
for a complete list. Listen to the podcast to find out about…
Atlanta! New Orleans! Savannah! For show notes including links to
all the colleges we mention, visit http://nycollegechat.org/30
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