Why Are HBCUs Still Needed? -- Part IV

Keepers of the Dream
This is my fourth attempt to address this question, and each version has been more pessimistic than the last as to the likelihood that the non-HBCUs in the integrated mainstream of U.S. higher education will close the persistent academic achievement gaps -- in retention rates, graduation rates, GPAs, participation in STEM fields, etc -- between their black and non-black students. (For example, see The Education Trust's May 2012 report "Replenishing Opportunity in America") The persistence of these gaps becomes ever more ominous as the percentage of black students enrolled in non-HBCUs rises to 90 percent and beyond.
  

Fifty years after the victorious Civil Rights Revolution of the 1960s, HBCUs should not exist. Fortunately they are still there because they provide an unexpected remedy for the unexpected failure of mainstream institutions to fulfill Dr. King's Dream, a dream that can only be fully realized in an integrated society wherein race has no more bearing on any kind of significant achievement than the width of one's shoes.

From Stagnation to Revolution
It seems to me that the mainstream has become integrated just enough to perpetuate academic achievement gaps indefinitely. It has now become awkward, politically incorrect, and possibly illegal for colleges and universities in the integrated mainstream to direct their funds and other resources towards developing remedies that might substantially improve the performance of their black students unless these remedies show promise of improving the performance of all students. For lack of sufficiently powerful innovations, the mainstream's traditional methods will leave black students stuck where they are.

Ironically, HBCUs are not bound by such constraints. For example, a random sample of students at most HBCUs would be mostly black. And there would be enough variation within the sample that researchers could explore the influence of non-racial factors on the students' performance. On the other hand, HBCUs have always had more diverse faculties than the mainstream. So they are better positioned to identify innovative teaching methods that also work for non-black instructors. Without such color-blind innovations, black students in the mainstream would be significantly disadvantaged until the faculties at those institutions become as diverse as their student bodies, something that won't occur, at the current pace, for at least another fifty years.

Archimedes, the great physicist/mathematician of the third century BC, claimed that if he had a long enough lever and a place to stand he could move the earth. Well I say that the community of HBCUs provides the ground where we can stand. And the lever we need to move U.S. higher education is the powerful cluster of inexpensive Internet technologies that are rapidly transforming every sector of every society on the planet. 

If black America's first revolution was the Civil Rights Revolution, I say that HBCUs should lead a second revolution, an Education Revolution, that will introduce inexpensive, Internet-based eLearning innovations in all courses in all programs that will be far more effective than the traditional methods that have failed to achieve the Dream, innovations that will be powerful enough to close the persistent black/white achievement gaps within the next ten to twenty years. 

Unfair Burden on HBCUs

Let me acknowledge right away that my perspective imposes an unfair burden on HBCUS. Fairness demands that the non-HBCUs in the mainstream that enroll almost 90 percent of the black students and have access to far more than 90 percent of the funds and other relevant resources of U.S. higher education should develop at least 90 percent of the needed innovations. Indeed, that's what I expected for most of my career as an educator, but no more. Why not? Because I finally accepted life's harsh lesson that necessity really is the mother of invention. 

In today's highly networked global economy, knowledge has become the coin of new opportunity. But the persistence of monumental historic disparities in our society means that all other things are still unequal; hence black students need more knowledge than their non-black peers to order to purchase the equal opportunities they desire. Hence Black America needs more powerful innovations in education than anyone else. In other words, most of the students in the mainstream may be content with slow moving evolution; but our students need a revolution, and they need it now.

Local Impacts

Let me also categorically state that I am not advocating that any HBCUs be closed if they only contribute limited leadership towards efforts to radically reorganize the nation's system of higher education. HBCUs are complex institutions that make a broad array of contributions to their local communities:

• On the one hand HBCUs have substantial impact on their local economies via their purchase of the goods and services they need to support their operations; and their students, faculty, and staff add to this impact via their purchase of goods and services as consumers.
   
• On the other hand, HBCUs employ highly educated faculty and staff who provide their communities with a reliable supply of informed citizens whose presence has substantial cognitive impact on their community's affairs via their participation as volunteers on PTA committees, school boards, after school tutoring programs, police review boards, library committees, churches, juries, charity drives, voter registration drives, political campaigns, etc, etc, etc.

So the existential question must be addressed on two levels, national and local. In other words, we should really ask, "Why is this particular HBCU still needed?" In many cases its tangible local contributions will greatly exceed its potential contributions to national initiatives.

A Case Study
It's too soon to say what the "Education Revolution" will look like once it's underway, so I conclude these notes with a sketch of an initiative with which I am personally involved that suggests that our goals may be clear, but our path from "here" to "there" may not be straight-forward ... :-)

• Tom Joyner's Appeal
  Howard-University is in the process of organizing a comprehensive array of online and blended, degree and certificate programs for non-traditional students. The immediate inspiration for this initiative came from Tom Joyner's impassioned appeal back in 2010 for HBCUs to become major players in the market for online programs, a market wherein the for-profit colleges and universities had become the fastest growing institutions.
  
  Note: Mr. Joyner is a successful radio personality and in the last ten years his Foundation has provided substantial philanthropic support for the HBCU community, second only to the Gates Foundation.
  
  Note: Non-traditional students have family and/or job responsibilities that prevent them from taking classes on a full-time basis on weekdays; they can only take classes part-time in the evenings, on weekends, or via distance learning.
   
• Black Enrollments
  A key point in Mr. Joyner's appeal was the fact that the explosive growth of the for-profits was fueled by their black enrollments. Indeed, somewhere between 25 percent (my estimate) and 40 percent (other analysts' estimates) of their students were black, i.e., two to three times the market share that one would have expected from the relative size of the black population with respect to the entire U.S. population.
   
• For-Profit Abuses
  These figures were alarming in the context of the abusive recruitment practices, low graduation rates, large student loans, high default rates, and subsequent unemployability of many of the graduates of the for-profit institutions -- as documented in hearings by Senator Harkin, GAO reports, and reviews by the U.S. Department of Education. In other words, Mr. Joyner was appealing to HBCUs to "Do well by doing good." If HBCUs offered high quality online programs that only recruited qualified black students, they would provide these students with better value for their tuition dollars ... and might earn substantial revenue in the process.
   
• Howard-Online
  Howard University's Board of Trustees responded to Mr. Joyner's appeal by directing the university's president to establish an administrative unit, eventually called "Howard-Online," to develop a feasible plan for Howard's entry into this market, a plan that would enable the University to offer a comprehensive array of degree and certificate programs within a few years.
  
  Note: Full disclosure requires that I inform the reader that I am Howard-Online's Director ... :-)
   
• Impediments to Online Programs
  Developing online and blended degree programs is easier said than done. All HBCUs face two major impediments:
  (1) Developing enough online courses to offer a degree program is expensive i.e., faculty members who are subject matter experts and instructional technologists who enhance the faculty's drafts have to be paid for the time required to develop online courses; and
  (2) Marketing online programs on the Web and elsewhere in today's highly competitive market is even more expensive. 
   
• Selective Private HBCUs face a third impediment:
  (3) Substantial segments of the faculty at selective private HBCUs, like their peers at selective private institutions in the mainstream, have reservations about the quality of online programs for non-traditional students compared to the quality of their traditional programs. Howard University is one of the most selective private HBCUs.
   
• Strategic Partners
  Developing and marketing a comprehensive array of online and blended programs will require very substantial up-front investments, investments that would strain Howard's budget in the context of the Great Recession. Therefore Howard-Online is currently considering an alternative approach: engaging a strategic partner.
  
  In this context, a strategic partner is a well-funded provider of online services who will cover the development and marketing costs of online programs in exchange for a negotiated share of the tuition received when students enroll in the programs.
   
• Quality Control through Faculty Control
  The second major component of Howard-Online's strategy is faculty control. All of the courses in Howard-Online's degree and certificate programs must be approved by the faculty; all instructors hired to teach the courses in its programs must have the degrees, years of teaching experience, and other qualifications specified by the faculty; and all students enrolled in its programs must have the GPAs, test scores, and other qualifications specified by the faculty.
   
• "Filling the Pipeline"
  The third major component of Howard-Online's strategy recognizes that at this point our faculty have only developed enough courses for a few degree programs that could be converted to online formats suitable for non-traditional students. Once those programs are launched, we have nothing left in our pipeline.
  
  Therefore in order to fill the pipeline, the University will award a larger share of the tuition revenue to its strategic partner in the initial years of Howard-Online's programs in exchange for the partner's providing personnel and other resources that will assist our faculty to move a substantial number of their courses from face-to-face formats to Web-enhanced, from Web-enhanced to blended, and from blended to online. At each stage the partner will support faculty members' efforts to adopt the specific Internet-based eLearning technologies that would be most likely to enhance the effectiveness of their courses.
  
  Note: As per the Sloan-Consortium's definitions, "Web-enhanced" courses deliver 10 to 30 percent of their content via the Web; "blended" courses deliver 30 to 80 percent via the Web; and "online" courses deliver 80 to 100 percent via the Web.
   
• Current Status ... RFI to RFP
  Howard-Online is currently selecting a strategic partner. A Request for Information (RFI) was published and four nationally renowned providers were invited to respond. In the coming months they will make formal presentations of their responses to the University's faculty, academic support staff, students, and senior administrators as to how their companies could help our faculty move enough courses through the pipeline so that Howard-Online would be able to offer a comprehensive array of degree and certificate programs to non-traditional students within a few years.
  
  At the end of the RFI discussion period, Howard-Online will publish a Request for Proposal (RFP). The providers' confidential responses will be assessed by a select committee of faculty who are experts in online methodology, by a select committee of the Faculty Senate, and by the University's senior administrators. A contract to become Howard-Online's strategic partner will be negotiated with the provider who submits the winning proposal.

_______________
Related Notes:

• Why Are HBCUs Still Needed? -- Part I
• Why Are HBCUs Still Needed? -- Part II
• Why Are HBCUs Still Needed? -- Part III
• The HBCU Community as a National Laboratory for U.S. Higher Education
• The Cognitive Impact of HBCUs
• HBCU Websites -- Some Best Practices
• HBCU Survival and Success

Related References:

• HBCU Distance Learning 2010
• Howard-Online

The Howard-Apps-Dev Group -- A Progress Report, April 2012

A. Howard University's High-Tech Incubator for Students
In early March 2012 a few colleagues at Howard University joined me in starting a high-tech incubator for Howard's students, who are mostly black. Our initiative's full name is the Howard University Applications Developers' Group, or Howard-Apps-Dev for short. We are currently focused on encouraging black students to become founder/entrepreneurs in the market for mobile apps, i.e., consumer applications for smart phones and tablets.

This note presents a progress report on our first eight weeks of operation. It's posted on the public HBCU-Levers blog so that it can be used by other HBCUs, MSIs, and colleges & universities having substantial black enrollments in their efforts to establish similar incubators on their own campuses. Additional progress reports will be posted on this blog from time to time, perhaps quarterly.

B. Individual Characteristics
In previous notes, I emphasized what I believed to be the most important characteristics that black students need in order to become successful high-tech entrepreneurs:

(1) Success = Technical Skills + Courage + ???

The required IT skills can be learned in computer science/info tech courses that are offered everywhere and/or from the Web, where free tutorials can be found on just about every relevant topic. Howard-Apps-Dev focuses on the mobile apps market because it has rapidly become the hottest sector in the short history of information technology and because it requires minimal skills sets compared to older, less lucrative high-tech sectors. Relatively small investments in study time and development can yield outsized financial rewards.

As for courage, the conventional wisdom holds that courage is innate; you either have it or you don't because you were born with it or you weren't. But the clustering of recent alums from a few academic institutions, most notably Stanford University, who have gone on to become highly successful entrepreneurs, would suggest that a substantial chunk of the particular kind of courage required by high-tech entrepreneurs may be learned behavior, i.e., behavior that can be taught or at least encouraged by the right academic environment.

Indeed, our incubator's working hypothesis is that many qualified black students opt out of high-tech entrepreneurial careers (a) because they perceive the presence of prejudice in high tech companies, possibly where it doesn't exist or is not as extensive as they think it is; and/or (b) because they don't believe they have enough talent to succeed.

Creating a supportive academic environment should help students recognize that the extraordinary financial gains to be made from becoming successful high-tech entrepreneurs, even in the face of the most discouraging prejudice, is well worth their efforts. More importantly, a supportive academic environment should enable students to acquire the kinds of hands-one experience in developing their own apps and related high-tech services that will let them realize that they do, indeed, have sufficient technical aptitude to become successful.

C. Incubator Features
Equation (1) above is incomplete because it focuses on the characteristics of the student entrepreneurs, but omits the features of the incubator that will nurture their success. This point bears elaboration. Most of the recent reports of successful high-tech entrepreneurs, especially those who were either still in college or were recent grads, make it plain that their success was a product of the interactions of their talents and entrepreneurial courage with favorable environments. The "complete" recipe for success is therefore represented by equation (2) below, wherein the last three components are the features of a supportive environment, such as an incubator, like Howard-Apps-Dev.

(2) Success = Technical Skills + Courage + Other Resources + Support Roles + V.I.P.s Networks

• Taking each of the last three (incubator) features in turn, the "Other Resources" includes hardware and software that an incubator's students use to develop and test their apps. Whereas the Integrated Development Environments (IDEs), Software Development Kits (SDKs), and other software tools may be free; the hardware is inexpensive, but not free. To be sure, many students might be able to afford a PC or a Mac, but not both. And many students may have an iPhone or some other kind of smartphone, but not an iPhone AND every kind of Android phone, AND every kind of Windows phone, AND every kind of Blackberry. But extensive arrays of smartphones and tablets would be affordable for an incubator based at a college or a university, especially if that incubator was able to engage the support of a V.I.P. network of successful developers, venture capitalists, foundations, government agencies, and other sources of external support.
• Whereas instructors, mentors, and role models abound in academia for most of the high-tech skills a student seeks to master, very few faculty and staff at any university have developed mobile apps that have been market winners; so an incubator like Howard-Apps-Dev will have to supplement its faculty and staff with willing members of its V.I.P. networks
• An incubator's V.I.P. networks include key players in the mobile apps markets who are willing to donate their time, IT resources, and funds to enable an incubator's students to become successful developers. Time and again the reports of the Internet's most successful start-ups disclose that the entrepreneurs' connections to a network of supportive V.I.P.s was crucial for their success -- high-tech gurus, private investors, venture capital firms, and other founder/entrepreneurs. Whereas a student would have difficulty getting any of these very important people to return his or her phone calls, initial contacts from representatives of an incubator within a respected university are likely to receive their most serious consideration.

D. Current Status of Howard-Apps-Dev -- April 20, 2012
As noted above, this initiative began shortly after it was conceived, about eight weeks ago in late March 2012. Howard University, like most colleges and universities, operates on a relatively inflexible semester schedule; so starting anything in late March quickly runs into the end of Spring semester crunch of final exams plus commencement preparations. Nevertheless, the group made significant progress:

• Enrolled 21 charter members -- including 11 students from computer science, electrical engineering, business, and law; 3 tenured faculty members (including the Chair of the Computer Sciences Department); 7 members of the University's senior technical staff; and a vice president who had founded two software firms before he joined the University three years ago. Additional members will be recruited in the Fall 2012 semester.
• Downloaded and installed the Eclipse IDE and the Android SDK on six PCs in one of the University's computer classrooms
• Created a blog at http://howard-apps-dev.blogspot.com whose posts summarized the weekly meetings and whose tabs provided links to useful resources on the Web; created a Google group; and created a group on LinkedIn (for communications with external V.I.P.s)
• Held five weekly meetings that identified the members' individual and shared interests in the mobile apps market
• Determined that the group's projects will cover all four major smartphone tablets -- Apple, Android, Windows Phone, and Blackberry; and would target Apple's iPad; no other tablets were specified yet.
• Developed preliminary specs for "The Howard App" as the group's first collective project. Work on the initial beta will begin in August 2012 and will be completed two weeks before the semester ends in December.
  
  When the Howard App is fully developed it will provide the members of the Howard community with all of the information they want to know about any aspect of campus life at any time of day or night via their smartphones or tablets. Because of its comprehensive scope, the fully developed Howard App will need extensive real-time access to the University's enterprise data stores -- PeopleSoft, Banner, and Blackboard. Therefore  the  group will only develop some early betas; the complete app will be developed and managed by the University's central computing services.

E. Summer Activities

• The group determined that its student members should spend the summer becoming familiar with the IDE and SDKs and using free tutorials on the Web to teach themselves how to use these tools. They should learn enough to begin coding modules for the Howard App when the Fall 2012 semester begins.
• The group's non-student members should spend the summer establishing relationships with V.I.P.s networks in the mobile apps market, especially in the Washington, DC area, relationships that can be used to provide experienced adjunct instructors, mentors, and role models for the students.
• The group's non-student members should also obtain essential "other resources" from the University and from the V.I.P. networks including: a permanent lab facility for the group equipped with networked developer workstations (PCs & Macs), an array of smartphones and tablets for demonstrating and testing the student apps, and access to market databases about sales and other demand indicators for existing mobile apps.

_______________________
Related Notes:

• Moses, Joshua, and Instagram
• Washington, Du Bois, and Silicon Valley
• High Tech Incubators for (Black) Students
• Closing the Digital Divide -- Another Opportunity 
• One Million Plus (non-black) Apps
• Fight or Flight (revised)

Moses, Joshua, and Instagram

In one the first speeches he made after he declared his candidacy for the U.S. Presidency in March 2007, then Senator Barack Obama -- addressing a congregation in Selma, Alabama -- summoned the post-Civil Rights generation to take up the challenges still facing black America with the same courage as the Civil Rights giants who had gone before them.

The giants were the Moses Generation; their immediate successors were the Joshua Generation. And just as Joshua, not Moses, led the Jews into the Promised Land, so too the work of Dr. King and his brethren did not complete the Dream; those challenges were left to their successors, to Senator Obama and his brethren of the Joshua Generation.

Unfortunately, the events of the last five years, especially the horrendous loss of wealth and jobs and other economic setbacks imposed on Black America by the Great Recession and the impending decimation of Medicare and other components of the Federal safety net make it plain that Senator Obama was an optimist. We may need two or three Joshua Generations to achieve the Dream ... especially if Black Americans don't seize the extraordinary financial opportunities that have been generated by the explosive growth of the Internet and its associated technologies, technologies that are now the most powerful drivers of the global economic system and will become even more powerful during the foreseeable future.

Joshua's Opportunities
In his speech, the young Senator expressed concern that the Joshua Generation "thinks that the height of  ambition is to make as much money as you can" ... whereas the older I get, the more concerned I become that Black America's Joshua Generations are not making as much money as they could or, more importantly, as much as they need to make. Money certainly isn't everything, but it's what you you need to pay your brother's mortgage when he loses his job in a Great Recession. It's what you need to pay for higher education for your son or daughter or nephew or niece when the state university raises its tuition, but their Pell grants and other financial aid get cut ... again. And it's what you need to pay for your grandmother's health care services when the Federal programs that provided those benefits are reduced or eliminated. And it's what we all need to elect the kinds of leaders who will be truly responsive to the broader needs of America's black communities.

Today's America is a land of increasing inequality, where those who have money have the best chances to live comfortable, satisfying lives ... as will their families and their friends ... but if you don't have it, aren't related to it, or don't have friends who have it, you won't live comfortably and life's satisfactions will be so much harder to come by. But now more than ever before, this America is also a land where the entrepreneur is king. Indeed, we are living in a Golden Age of Entrepreneurship. And the biggest financial rewards have gone to the high-tech entrepreneurs of the Internet. Never before have so many entrepreneurs made so many billions of dollars so quickly.

Instagram
Last week's purchase of Instagram by Facebook is a case in point. The press gave extensive coverage to this purchase, but an article in the NY Times underscored the facets I want to emphasize, "Facebook to Buy Photo-Sharing Service Instagram for $1 Billion" (New York Times, 4/13/2012):

• "Instagram, an Internet start-up in San Francisco, has no revenue and about a dozen employees."
• "Instagram is essentially a social network built around photography, offering mobile apps that let people add quirky effects to their smartphone snapshots and share them with friends."
• "For Instagram’s founders, two Stanford graduates in their 20s who are now worth in the tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars, it has been a productive couple of years."
• "Mr. Systrom [one of the founders of Instagram] was a sophomore at Stanford in 2004 when he developed a service called Photobox that let people send large photo files to each other. The service caught the eye of Mr. Zuckerberg [Facebook's CEO], who offered him a job. But Mr. Systrom decided to finish his studies."

Please take special note about the last point. Mr. Systrom conceived the idea when he was a sophomore. It's a simple idea. It runs on smartphones, so it's a small program that didn't take long to write or debug. No one has accused Mr. Systrom of breaking new ground in computer science. So how hard could it be to produce an app like Instagram? The answer is obvious ==> not very.

No Black Instragrams
To date, there have been no boy billionaires and no boy multimillionaires who were black. Is it possible that Caucasians and Asians have won all of the prizes because of their genetic superiority? Of course not. Decades of research have thoroughly discredited the self-serving myths about the innate superiority of any ethnic groupings ... so it must be racism, right? ...

... Yeah ...  Residual racism in our society explains every gross disparity now and forevermore. Isn't that what we've been taught and have been teaching each other ever since the monumental legislative victories of our Moses Generation made racism illegal? Unfortunately, this time the only explanation that's supported by the facts on the ground is that Caucasians and Asians have been the only winners because blacks and other minorities haven't been players on the Internet. This is the first Big Game where the costs of entry are so low that just about anyone can afford to play. The computers are cheap, the software development tools are free, and the knowledge of how to use the computers and software tools can be acquired from free tutorials that have popped up all over the Web.

We Can't Win If We Don't Play
I suggest that the real reason why black Americans haven't been players -- correction: have been grossly underrepresented among the players -- is because too many of us are convinced that we don't have a chance to win. Programming computers is hard, right? You have to have a PhD from one of the best universities on the planet to be able to create a zillion dollar game for an XBox or a viral app for a tablet or a smartphone, right? Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. So I also suggest that it's time for our well-intended, but grossly misinformed "leaders" who have been perpetuating these urban myths to shut up.

What it takes nowadays to become winning participants in the Internet Revolution is a modicum of talent, training, and experience coupled with gigantic chunks of courage, the courage to become a successful entrepreneur, the same courage that propelled the Moses Generation to their historic  legislative victories.  Dr. King and his brethren were social and legislative entrepreneurs because generating sufficient pressure to change the laws that justified America's oppressive apartheid created the greatest opportunities for the advancement of America's black communities back then. The Talented Tenth of the Joshua Generations will need the courage to become high-tech entrepreneurs because that's where the greatest opportunities for advancement of America's black communities are to be found today.

Courage
Having said my piece, I can already hear the murmurings of prominent black nay-sayers, humming their all-too-familiar blues about how it can't be done. They're always out there. And the bigger the goals we set for ourselves, the louder they sing their same old discouraging chorus, "White America won't let a black person enjoy that kind of success ... not now ... perhaps not ever."  Dr. King addressed his brilliant "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" to nay-sayers who were absolutely certain of their "wisdom" that he was trying to do what couldn't be done ... but he did it!!! ... :-)

It takes courage to be an entrepreneur, and given the persistence of powerful racist forces in American society it takes even more courage to become any kind of black entrepreneur. So I agree with Senator Obama, who silenced the nay-sayers for at least a few moments in January 2009 when he swore the oath that made him President Obama ==> it takes courage to be a Joshua.

__________________
Related Notes:

• Washington, Du Bois, and Silicon Valley
• High Tech Incubators for (Black) Students
• One Million Plus (non-black) Apps
• Fight or Flight (revised)
• Earnings Lost by Opting Out of STEM

Washington, Du Bois, and Silicon Valley

One hundred plus years ago, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois  engaged in a protracted dispute:

• Mr. Washington encouraged black Americans to advance their economic positions by acquiring the skills required for manual trades and lower level white collar occupations. The businesses they could establish with these skills would provide services that were greatly needed by American society, but would encounter less racist resistance than businesses based on higher level skill sets.
   
• Dr. Du Bois  resisted any "compromises" that surrendered opportunities for black America's best and brightest to develop their abilities to the fullest extent because he believed that the "Talented Tenth" were the primary engines of black economic progress. Hence he argued that racism should not be accommodated, that it must be resisted and, eventually, overcome. 

This summary grossly oversimplifies the positions of both men, but it is accurate enough to underscore the fundamental incompatibility of their strategies for the economic advancement of black America ... an incompatibility that persisted for the next eighty years until the dawn of the information age and the "progressive digitization of everything."

Ironically, the sudden emergence of computers and computer networks -- the most brilliant products of the world's most advanced science, technology, engineering, and mathematics -- as the dominant forces shaping modern economies has opened extraordinary economic opportunities for persons with high aptitude and minimal education. While it's still necessary for students to obtain PhDs to become leaders in the "S" and "M" of STEM, i.e., science and mathematics; the "T" and "E" -- technology and engineering -- have become the Wild, Wild West with regards to information technology and software engineering.

Steve Jobs (Apple), Bill Gates (Microsoft), and Marc Zuckerman (Facebook), three of the most successful entrepreneurs in the short history of information technology, were college drop-outs; other IT billionaires -- like Jerry Yang and David Filo (Yahoo!), Sergey Brin  and Larry Page (Google)  -- dropped out of grad school. Their dirty little not-so-secret is that you don't need a college degree to learn how to use computers and computer networks to create services for which the markets will shower you with billions of dollars -- if you have the right mix of technical and entrepreneurial aptitudes. None of these boy billionaires studied long and hard at anything before they made their vast fortunes. And for all of the pain that Wall Street's Masters-of-the-Universe inflicted on millions of Americans as consequence of the Great Recession that was triggered by their felonious greed, few of them have amassed fortunes as large as the Silicon Valley elite.

Partisans could plausibly support either protagonist in the Washington vs. Du Bois debates one hundred years ago. But as we move into the New Millennium, the facts on the ground are squarely on Mr. Washington's side of the line ... for the foreseeable future. Back then, he preached that every student should learn a trade, whatever else they learned in school; in today's markets that trade should be skills and certifications in information technology. As for Dr. Du Bois' Talented Tenth, we should encourage them to become IT entrepreneurs, because that's where their efforts will earn the biggest  returns ... for the foreseeable future. And yes, our black high-tech wannabe entrepreneurs will encounter racism, but so what. The level of racism they will encounter is substantially lower than it was one hundred years ago, while the potential financial gains are substantially higher.

_______________________
Related notes:

• Moses, Joshua, and Instagram
• High Tech Incubators for (Black) Students
• One Million Plus (non-black) Apps
• Closing the Digital Divide -- Another Opportunity
• Closing the Digital Divide at HBCUs
• Howard University's Applications Developers Group

High Tech Incubators for (Black) Students

The "black" in the title of this note may prove to be irrelevant to its content, but is central to its purpose. On the one hand, academia's steady production of non-black, high-tech superstars provides ample evidence that American colleges and universities somehow manage to stimulate non-black students to become successful high-tech entrepreneurs:

• Bill Hewlett and David Packard (Hewlett-Packard, Stanford), Steve Jobs (Apple, Reed College), Steve Wozniak (Apple, U of Califormia Berkeley), Bill Gates (Microsoft, Harvard), Marc Andreeson (Netscape, U. of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), Jerry Yang and David Filo (Yahoo!, Stanford), Sergey Brin  and Larry Page (Google, Stanford), and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook, Harvard).

By contrast, the lack of comparably successful black entrepreneurs suggests that American colleges and universities aren't providing comparable stimulation for their black students. So the Howard-Apps-Dev incubator at Howard University and similar initiatives at other institutions are breaking new ground that will probably require new, possibly radically new approaches. Given that creativity respects no racial boundaries, academic innovations that make it more likely for black students to achieve success as entrepreneurs will probably provide similar benefits for non-black students.

Blending Incompatible Frameworks
It seems to me that a high-tech incubator for students (HTI-S) must something like a platypus, a contradictory creature that National Geographic describes as follows:

"Duck-billed platypuses can't be real, can they? This small, amphibious mammal has a tail like a beaver, a body like an otter, walks like a reptile, has webbed feet and a beak like a bird, and it lays eggs!"

An HTI-S will have to be a cross between an academic interdisciplinary research program and a commercial business incubator, inheriting incompatible characteristics from both parents. Given the current focus of Howard's incubator on apps for mobile platforms, my comments will focus on this particular kind of incubator:

• Expertise vs. Teaching Skills
  -- When students become members of academic research teams, these teams are usually headed by faculty because faculty usually have more relevant expertise than their students. But where mobile apps are involved, this may be a dubious assumption, especially for apps directed at the young adult market wherein students may have keener insights than faculty who are twenty or more years older.
  
  -- The mentors with the most demonstrable expertise in such markets are likely to be the most successful developers of mobile apps, i.e., the entrepreneur/founders of profitable start-up operations. But their greater understanding of what it takes to succeed doesn't guarantee that they will know how to teach what they know. In other words, faculty have two kinds of expertise, subject matter and teaching; whereas entrepreneurs may only know what they know.
  
  -- One way to address this mismatch might be to persuade successful entrepreneurs to become "adjunct" members of the incubator staff. These role models could inspire the students and tell them what they need to know; then the participating faculty could teach the students the specific skills that the entrepreneurs recommended that they learn... :-)
  
  -- An equally important benefit that will come from involving successful entrepreneur/founders in a HTI-S will be their memberships in the networks of other high tech companies, marketing firms, and venture capital operations and the exposure to these networks these successful adjuncts can give to the students enrolled in courses and projects sponsored by an HTI-S at a college or university.
  
  
• Tests vs. Downloads
  How should we measure a student's success in an incubator? Clearly, the ultimate metrics should be market indicators, e.g., the number of times an app is downloaded by new users from online markets (or from a local Website hosted by the incubator) in the first few weeks after it's posted, the dollars earned in the first few weeks, etc. However, it also seems reasonable that the faculty who are supporting the students' efforts should regard market metrics as summative indicators that are invoked upon an app's completion; but while the apps is under development, while the students are learning the component skills required to produce successful apps, their mastery of these skills should be measured by faculty grades on earlier drafts as formative measures that would guide the student's learning efforts.
  
  
• Earning a Grade vs. Launching a Business
  The two sides of this issue are especially incompatible, so I'm going to take two shots at this one; and being a to-the-bone-Libra, I will achieve a balanced perspective by offering strong support both sides ... :-)
  
  First, the traditional perspective ==> colleges and universities are academic institutions that teach their students the knowledge and skills they will need to achieve success in their personal and professional lives after they graduate. Students who develop apps with the support and encouragement of an HTI-S should be expected to learn how to produce marketable apps, but not to become entrepreneur/founders of new enterprises that produce these marketable apps for income and profit before they graduate. The higher the grades the students receive for their participation in an HTI-S, the more confident they should be that they have, indeed, acquired the knowledge and skills they sought to learn.
  
  
• Unsuccessful Graduates vs. Successful Drop-outs
  How should we measure the success of an HTI-S? Clearly, the ultimate metrics should be market indicators, e.g., the number/percentage of the students who participate in the HTI-S who go on to become entrepreneur/founders of high-tech startups and the number/percentage who succeed. Otherwise an HTI-S will merely be running a "high-tech appreciation" program.
  
  But how soon should these outcomes be measured? How soon should an HTI-S encourage its students to launch their own startup companies? Entrepreneurs, by definition, are not salaried employees; they are risk takers. So an HTI-S should encourage its students to launch their own start-ups as soon as they are able to assume the risks involved ... with the understanding that  sometimes this capability may be realized before a student graduates.
  
  Some of the most successful non-black high tech entrepreneurs mentioned earlier in this note dropped out of undergraduate or graduate programs, e.g,  Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates, Jerry Yang, David Filo, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Mark Zuckerberg.
  
  Colleges and universities have been wrestling with this dilemma for decades with regards to their star athletes, many of whom were black, who dropped out of college before graduation in order to launch careers as professionals. Would the drop-outs who went on to become the highly paid superstars of the pro leagues have been better off had they waited until they graduated?

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Related notes:

• Moses, Joshua, and Instagram
• Washington, Du Bois, and Silicon Valley
• One Million Plus (non-black) Apps 
• Closing the Digital Divide -- Another Opportunity
• Closing the Digital Divide at HBCUs