Norton Bill Wants HBCU Graduate Funds to Match Existing Funding for Undergraduate Education (6/15/07

Washington, DC- Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC) today introduced a bill to extend federal Historically Black College and University (HBCU) funding for graduate programs and the David A. Clark School of Law at the University of the District of Columbia (UDC), to allow UDC to increase its production of skilled graduates in vital disciplines where there are jobs here, particularly in areas where African Americans are underrepresented. The University has graduate degree programs in cancer biology prevention and control, early childhood education, mathematics, special education, and speech and language pathology, among other graduate programs in the College of Arts and Sciences, the David A. Clarke School of Law, and the School of Business and Public Administration. A graduate curriculum is being developed in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.

Norton succeeded in getting Congress to grant UDC much sought after annual HBCU funding for undergraduate programs as received by other HBCUs, in 1999, but similar recognition of graduate programs requires separate legislation. Norton got HBCU funding status for UDC by making the denial to the D.C. HBCU an issue at the time that she got Congress to pass her District of Columbia College Access Act that established the D.C. Tuition Assistance Grant (TAG) program. That bill recognizes the fact that, unlike every state, D.C. has no state university system with several choices of colleges to attend. TAG, therefore, enables D.C. residents to attend public colleges and HBCUs in the region and the country at low in-state tuition rates otherwise unavailable to non-residents. In her statement of introduction, Norton noted that funding from the Historically Black Graduate Institutions program will allow UDC-the District's only public university-to increase educational and employment opportunities, especially for African Americans, Hispanics and other residents of limited means, and to strengthen its graduate programs particularly in occupations where there are shortages in the region.

UDC is one of the nation's oldest HBCUs, but Congress resisted giving the University federal funding as an HBCU until Norton linked the measure to the TAG bill. She said, "Offering complete HBCU funding for UDC will help the institution's graduate schools which is critical to meeting the demands of this city's upscale job pool. Undergraduate training is insufficient to meet many jobs in the public and private sectors that require just the kind of graduate training that UDC offers."