There are 6.3 million African-Americans over 25 with some college or an associate degree, and 700,000 set out each year to complete their undergraduate degree. That’s what the executives at Tom Joyner Online Education LLC call a significant “degree completion” audience.
It’s a market, executives say, HBCUs should dominate but have ceded to predominantly online institutions like the University of Phoenix, which has the largest Black student enrollment of any U.S. institution and is the number one producer of bachelor’s degrees awarded to African-Americans.
Launched by radio personality and longtime HBCU booster Tom Joyner, HBCUsOnline is one of two new enterprises — the other an online university being developed by a former Radio One executive for for-profit Latimer Education — seeking to tap into the lucrative online adult higher education market. In addition, Dr. Benjamin Chavis, president of Education Online Services Corporation, has partnered with the National Association For Equal Opportunity in Higher Education (NAFEO) to build online degree programs at member schools.
The mission of Joyner’s for-profit educational services company is to help HBCU partners increase their market share, enrollment and revenue through marketing to Joyner’s morning show audience — 8 million listeners — and to provide other technical assistance to help them offer degree programs online.
Hampton and Texas Southern universities were the first to sign on with HBCUsOnline, which will launch in January. Hampton already has an extensive online program.
Neil Foote, spokesman for HBCUsOnline.com, says Joyner watched as African-Americans turned to the online-education model to fit in with their busy schedules but became unhappy with the results.
“That got Tom thinking: ‘Why should Blacks go to these ‘new schools’ when Black colleges have been around here for decades educating many of the nation’s Black doctors, lawyers, engineers and teachers?’” Foote says.
