It would be easy to look at the fight brewing with the city of Madison and Tulane University versus Jackson State University and say it’s about race. It would also be an oversimplification that is not entirely correct.
Granted, this is mostly supposition, but it’s educated supposition based on current higher education trends.
Tulane and JSU chose to move to Madison for the same reason: There is a growing number of students between 25 and 40 who are returning to college but who cannot do so in a traditional manner. So instead of trying to get students to come to the universities, the universities are going to the students.
Madison is a good market for obvious reasons. It’s got a high growth rate, full of younger families who fit the age demographics and have additional population bases close by in Ridgeland and Canton. Too, with Nissan just down the road, there’s the potential for corporate partnership.
But higher education has become an increasingly more competitive field. Combine a difficult economy, rising tuition costs and a high unemployment rate, and you get one of the toughest possible markets for higher education imaginable. So while competition may be good for the consumer, universities aren’t looking to compete unless they have the clear advantage.
In today’ economy, the clear advantage is cost. JSU costs $250 a credit hour; the Tulane Madison-campus costs $312 a credit hour. Honestly, that’s not a huge difference, though it certainly is a slight advantage to JSU.
But here’s where race does play into it. JSU, like all historically black colleges in Mississippi, must continue to raise non-minority enrollment numbers in conjunction with the Ayers settlement. In other words, JSU is trying to attract white students to undergraduate and graduate programs. To do so, they offer some unbelievable scholarships, some ranging as high as full tuition and books.
I have a good friend who is going back to school to get his master’s degree in public policy at JSU. He looked at several schools and settled on JSU for two reasons:
- It kept him here in the Jackson area.
- They gave him a full ride.
So while their face-value costs are not that different, JSU has a distinct advantage with prospective white students. I’m not sure what percentage of prospective students in Madison County are white, but I suspect we’re looking at approximately half of the target population. When all of a sudden you lose a major competitive edge over half of your target base, you grow concerned.
Talk of a JSU campus moving to Madison and turning it into a slum – that’s a real comment by someone – is just ludicrous. It’s not race at the core of this fight. It’s business at the core, and the business of higher education is a lot more competitive today than in the past.
If the Institutions of Higher Learning didn’t follow proper protocol in granting JSU the lease, they should rescind the approval and go through the process again. Otherwise, there’s no reason not to let JSU open in Madison. It’s just business.