Digging deeper for tuition

Black Issues in Higher Education, July 11, 1996 by Ronald A. Taylor

daunting one. "It's huge," says Terri Harris

Reed, assistant

dean of the school

of public affairs at

the University

Maryland.

Dr. Reed also is program coordinator for

the university's Public Policy and Inter

national Affairs Statute, a project in which

undergraduate students in their junior year

are exposed to international affairs and, if

they meet the academic requirements and

commit to enrolling in an affairs masters'

degree programs, offered a fellowship to cover

three years of graduate school tuition.

Harsh Fiscal Reality

For the average graduate student, harsh

fiscal reality is that they are going to have to

look hard for money to pay for school.

Even if they find an attractive looking

financial aid package, it often covers only the

first year of a three year program or is subject

to reduction after the first year as the school

uses part of the fellowship to entice more

graduate students.

In addition they face tough competition

from foreign students.

"I've come to recognize that there is a

deliberate preference for foreign students over

Black students," says former Morgan State

graduate school dean Frank Morris.

Dr. Morris contends that foreign students

are favored because they are less

contentious, more diligent and often well-drilled

in academic skills useful to needs of the scholars

who supervise them.

The Education Resources-Institute of

Higher Education Policy report says that the

average annual cost of graduate tuition in 1995

was $6,177. For the professional

schools, the annual tariff was even

higher: $12,194 for law school, $13,666 for

medicine and $14,398 for dentistry.

At those prices, the idealistic motivations

for becoming a lawyer, science professor or

even a librarian are tempered by the blunt

reality of post-graduate debt, says Percy Luney,

dean of the North Carolina Central University

Law school.

"Many students get

in so much debt hat

when they come out

they are under pressure

to find a high paying job,

After they graduate,

they can't follow their

conscience. They have

to service their debts,"

Luney says.

He and other

graduate school experts

say money is available to

cover tuition, fees and

the living costs

associated with full-time

graduate study but the

minority student is going

to have to approach

the quest with a single-minded focus and a bit of

resourcefulness.

For example, a young woman, now in her

second year of teaching Japanese at a

historically Black college said her minority

colleagues at a highly selective graduate school

for international affairs were amazed, and

jealous, when they found out how she was

meeting her tuition.

She had a National Science Foundation

fellowship that covered the then$13,000 a year

tuition and paid a $1,100 a month stipend as

well. How did she find it? By looking through

announcement circulars and not assuming the

word "science" limited the fellowship to the

hard sciences.

"I figured they must have something for

social science candidates, and I was right," she

says.

That approach is what is needed to succeed,

says Howard Adams.

"If you do what you did to get into

undergraduate school, you won't even get in grad