i would like to HBCU, and the schools i really would be interested in attending are Morehouse College, Howard University, Hampton University, Tennessee State University, FAMU, North Carolina Central University, CAU,Prairie View A&M, and Southern University and A&M College. i’m leaning towards attending Morehouse but still i have yet to visit these schools to really see the atmosphere and things of that nature, hopefully i do visit these schools during the summer. but yeah which one of these schools do you think are good for these majors ?
Hi, I went to Spelman!
Morehouse is good for business - business is one of the most popular majors at Morehouse, and they have a great business administration program there. When I was at Spelman the top Wall Street firms came down to recruit at Morehouse and Spelman - a lot of my friends went off to work at Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, and Merrill Lynch et al. Howard and Hampton have good majors in business, too; you can major directly in finance there, and they also have recruiting from top companies too. Another good HBCU with a business program is Xavier University of Louisiana.
Morehouse doesn’t have it’s own engineering program per se; it has a 3/2 program with several other universities. You spend 3 years at Morehouse taking a curriculum in the sciences and pre-engineering, and then you transfer to another university that has engineering and spend 2 years there getting the engineering degree. At the end you have two bachelor’s degrees - one in DDEP from Morehouse, and one in engineering from the other school. Morehouse has partnerships with some top schools - including Georgia Tech, Columbia, Notre Dame, Michigan, USC and Dartmouth. Or, if you wanted to transfer to another engineering school, you could go to NC A&T. There’s a lot of support for 3+2 students at Morehouse; a lot of my friends were 3+2 students at Morehouse (because my husband was one). Most of them transferred and finished the engineering degree; I think the majority transferred to Georgia Tech, because it’s close by. If you’re interested in aerospace engineering and astronautics, look up Project SPACE at Morehouse - it’s a special scholarship program that covers all of your costs but also has special summer internships and programs in engineering, including a summer in Huntsville at the NASA center there. My husband did this program at Morehouse.
FAMU is also known for it’s great engineering; it shares an engineering school with FSU. Hampton and Howard both have their own native engineering schools/programs, so you wouldn’t have to transfer there. Some other schools not on your list that are great HBCUs and have good engineering are NC A&T and Tuskegee. Southern, TSU, and Prairie View also all have “native” engineering programs, so you wouldn’t have to transfer.
Honestly, were you to ask my opinion, I think that Morehouse, Howard, and Hampton are the best HBCUs on your list. At Howard and Hampton you could do any of your major interests natively; at Morehouse you could definitely go business, but you’d have to do 3+2 for engineering. Tuskegee is another good school not on your list that has both engineering and business… FAMU (and NC A&T, which isn’t on your list) would be good if you knew you wanted to do engineering.
Also, I’m biased, but the AUC (Morehouse + Spelman + Clark Atlanta) is soooooo much fun to be a college student in. Other HBCU students drive down for hours to come to our homecoming because it’s off the chain 
However, we do often drive up to see Howard’s and Hampton’s homecoming and some people drive down to FAMU. Going to an HBCU was just so much fun - I loved it. But the academics and the respect from the good HBCUs are there, too; I have a PhD from Columbia and a lot of my classmates and friends who went to other HBCUs are now rocking graduate degrees and working excellent jobs.
Good luck! PM me if you have any questions. Also, if you could, I would visit in the fall when there are actual students on campus. the AUC is dead over the summer, so you won’t get a real feel for what it’s like to be a student there.
If you have high GPA and ACT or SAT scores, some of these schools may have large automatic merit scholarships for you, according to http://automaticfulltuition.yolasite.com/ :
Tuskegee (3.5 GPA, 26 ACT or 1180 SAT CR+M)
Howard (3.0 GPA, 26 ACT or 1170 SAT CR+M)
Florida A&M (3.5 GPA, 27 ACT or 1800 SAT CR+M+W)
Prairie View A&M (3.25 GPA, 24 ACT or 1650 SAT CR+M+W)
Also, North Carolina A&T has competitive full ride scholarships that you can seek.
These schools are all different with different offerings, as Julliet indicated.
NC A&T may be the strongest traditional engineering (can’t speak to Bioengineering or Computer Engineering) program among HBCUs. Some Florida A&M engineering students have done well, be but advised about the festering political controversy involving the joint A&M and FSU School of Engineering. The off-again/on-again bickering about the fate of the joint operation (it has its own campus, independent of both A&M and FSU) is holding the school back, some say.
As for Prairie View, well I know a STEM major who graduated from PVA&M and loved it. I hear that Tuskegee engineers are sharp, but they complain about Tuskegee’s outdated facilities.
A word about 3/2 programs. Glad to hear that Julliet’s husband enjoyed his program, but most folks here on cc do not recommend 3/2 programs because few enrollees ever actually complete the program. Kids ultimately decline to transfer to the target engineering school for various reasons, not the least of which being that they want to stay with their friends and graduating class at the home college. Also, the target engineering school may not guarantee financial aid. And as a practical matter, having 2 bachelor’s degrees is no advantage in the traditional engineering disciplines. Consider that you could use the additional year to complete most of the requirements for a master’s degree, which technology firms would value more than a second B.S.
If the ratio of Black students among the campus population is important to you, think about majority campuses that possess a substantial number of Black folks in the student body;
U of Illinois-Chicago
U of Alabama-Birmingham
U of Texas-Arlington
My top 5 engineering schools for blacks
- NC A&T - #1 producer of black engineers and the Aggie network is strong
- GA Tech - former #1 producer of black engineers and plus it's in the "Black Mecca"
- Texas Southern - brand new engineering program with brand new tier 1 facilities and endless opportunity nearby living in Downtown Houston. The odds of having to completely uproot yourself after graduation is very low unlike at schools in NC, FL, and Alabama
- FAMU - program has a solid reputation and is among the top producers of black engineers
- Prairie View - program has a solid reputation and is ideally located 30 miles away from Houston and 3 away from Houston which is an gold mine when it comes to engineering jobs and large black populations.
FWIW,
FAMU ranks #117 on us news for best engineering schools
I think it is the only HBCU that ranks.
You know, I have seen people say this on CC but no one has offered any concrete evidence with respect to how often this actually happens. Most of my friends in the 3/2 program in college finished it just fine (ironically, my husband was not one of those people: he dropped out and joined the military, then re-entered college later at Columbia. I only referred to him because I met a lot of my 3/2 friends through him). One of the reasons for that is that our biggest 3/2 partner, Georgia Tech, was geographically pretty close - but our 3/2 students transferred to a lot of the different options all over the country, including Columbia, RPI, and NCA&T. Another potential reason is that the 3/2 program has a pretty great community at Morehouse and Spelman, so a lot of students transfer to the same institution together (although that’s not universally true, either).
I have done some research and none of the schools I’ve seen with 3/2 programs actually post their 3/2 completion rates online, so I feel like the only way to know for sure would be to ask (which is something I would totally do were I considering a 3/2 program) I’m sure that some college students want to stay with their friends and graduate, but there are many college students who value their major and career more and still transfer, and others who are eager to try something new after 3 years.
I don’t think the value of a dual-degree engineering program is having two bachelor’s degrees. They’re usually undertaken by students who really want to attend a school that doesn’t have an engineering program - either because they really want a liberal arts college experience for three years, or because there’s some other element of this school that they want. People came to Morehouse and Spelman because they wanted to attend a small historically black LAC for three years and have the Morehouse or Spelman experience.
Carleton sort of does at https://apps.carleton.edu/curricular/physics/for_students/department_links/engineering/questions/ :
Mmm, I think we’ve talked about the Carleton stats before. The email list is simply expressing interest, which is different from actually pursuing the program by taking coursework at Carleton to prepare for the 3/2 program. There are probably students who leak out at each way - a large number of students who consider the 3/2 program at Carleton before attending but then choose other schools, some of them regular engineering schools, because of a variety of reasons; students who consider the 3/2 program once they are already at Carleton, but opt out for another variety of reasons; and then students who are more seriously interested in the program and possibly even start the coursework, but decide sophomore or junior year that they really just want to finish their time up at Carleton or don’t want to spend 5 years in college or really want to graduate with their class.
However, I think question #3 is instructive:
It indicates that it does happen, and may be a major factor in students choosing not to pursue the 3/2 program or leaving it before finishing.