<p>Simply joining ROTC doesn’t cover your tuition and fees, Chimichonga. You have to apply for a 3-year ROTC scholarship. They are competitive, although the competition really depends on the branch (the Air Force ones are the most competitive; the Army ones are the least; the Navy’s are somewhere in between). ROTC gives everyone the stipend (between $200 and $450 a month depending on what year you are in) but not everyone gets the tuition coverage; that’s a scholarship.</p>
<p>I think it’s false to say that UA graduates have poor prospects for jobs simply because it’s not that highly-ranked; especially if grads intend to stay in the South, Alabama has a lot of cred around there. It may not be hot stuff in the Northeast because of the prevalance of expensive private colleges, but in the South almost everyone goes to one of their state’s flagship schools. </p>
<p>I think that black students, on average, find themselves (ourselves, I suppose, for I am black) in the kind of position that this poster’s niece has found herself in, precisely because the parents of black students are less likely to be college educated and have a knowledge of the way the system works. In the U.S. only 25% of the people over age 25 have bachelor’s degrees; for African Americans, however, that proportion goes down to 18%. And that’s including people in my generation; in my parents’ generation (they graduated from high school in 1979) college was a pipe dream; anything beyond vocational/technical training or maybe a few community college classes was a pipe dream, really. And if they DID go, they were far more likely to go to their local community college or public regional.</p>
<p>So you have a generation of parents who - even if they are middle class - aren’t as equipped to advise their children on the application process as their more highly-educated white peers. So you get situations like this - where a student thinks they have to major in sports medicine at the undergrad level to do it at the grad level, or a student thinks they have to be a biology major to go into medicine even if they hate biology, or thinks they have to be pre-law to go to law school (it took me almost a full year to convince my fiance’s younger sister that it’d be in her best interests NOT to major in “pre-law” to prepare for law school; I don’t even think “pre-law” was offered as a major at her uni).</p>
<p>I think that black families also have a more pre-professional focus when it comes to college; it’s not about discovering yourself and doing what you love (as a lot of white families have come to view college after generations of experience with it) but the see it as an expensive thing and thus it needs to be job preparation. I’ve dealt with a lot of black friends whose parents “sent them to college to be” something - a lawyer, a doctor, a dentist…I remember suggesting teaching to one of my friends who liked kids and she said something like “Yeah, my parents will just say ‘we didn’t send you to college to be a teacher’.” My fiance’s parents were also dismayed when they found out from him that he wanted to be a teacher; previously he was going to be an aerospace engineer and that was worthy to them, but teaching? (Especially because he’s male.)</p>
<p>We also on average have far less wealth, own homes less, own our own cars less, and generally have fewer experiences on which we’re educated in debt management. To someone who doesn’t really understand debt it may be difficult to fathom the difference between a $30,000 loan (manageable) and a $60,000 loan (a burden). Our families also have some wildly disproportionate notions about the kind of success college brings you; I have people in my family who are convinced that I’m going to be “making bank” simply because I have a college degree (or even with a PhD as a professor), so they may encourage their children to take out large loans to go to ‘good’ schools (or even mediocre schools) thinking that their kids may have no problems paying it back.</p>
<p>So yeah, this ignorance (and not self-imposed; black people have been kept out of colleges and owning things until relatively recently in history) in a variety of areas contributes to the higher amounts of debt in black students, I think.</p>