Higher Education and Financial Stability



Higher Education and Financial Stability

Introduction

This paper discussed the financial problems that the higher education systems faced throughout the Southern association of Colleges and schools. The paper will also discuss the problems that were faced by the students studying in these institutions. The institution said they had avoided worst-case budget scenarios in the 2009-10 academic year, they were already beginning to prepare for the deeper cuts they expected to encounter around the corner.

The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools was founded three decades after the Civil War to provide consistent and higher academic standards among the most prominent White southern colleges and universities, where funding and educational quality had not recovered from the war. In the 1930s, Black colleges asked the association to visit and evaluate their programs and provide an approved list that would facilitate students' applications for graduate and professional schools. This separate evaluation continued until 1961, when Black colleges were absorbed in the larger association. This entry provides an overview of the association and then looks more closely at its relationship with Black schools (Sweet, 1971).

In 1931, the membership of the Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools of the Southern States voted to change its name to theSouthern Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools.To help students also facing financial challenges, some institutions in the Southern association of Colleges and schools tried to keep tuition for 2010-11 at the previous year's levels, or to keep increases relatively low. Many of those colleges cautioned that they will not be able to make the same decisions next year without additional state revenue (Stiltner, 1982).

Discussion

College authorities observed that in 1895, higher education for southern White colleges was chaotic, as a consequence of economic decline following emancipation. They concluded that the situation for African Americans, having been emancipated just 30 years earlier, was even more chaotic. At the same time, association records acknowledged that because of generous contributions from churches and foundations, some African American schools were doing better financially than were their White peers. Dillard of New Orleans is mentioned specifically.

Atlanta and Nashville schools were also cited as being exemplary, including Spelman, Morehouse, and Morris Brown. In Birmingham, Parker HighSchool was the “largest high school for African Americans in the world.” It had been built during the height of the Ku Klux Klan movement in spiteof threats to the Birmingham Board of Education (Snavely, 1945).

Leaders of the Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools of the Southern States had such “tremendous problems of their own that it did not occur to them to meddle in the affairs of their African American neighbors”. Minutes of the commission's 1920 report indicate that northern colleges had requested a list of the best African American schools, and the commission recommended that a supplementary list be prepared and published separately.

State legislatures particularly worried about whether they would receive millions of dollars in federal money they had accounted for in their budget plans. State leaders called on Congress to extend the Federal Medical ...