Forum: Minority-serving Campuses Urged to Tout Their Success: WASHINGTON— At a policy forum organized to have minority-serving institutions (MSI) share their success stories with policymakers and education access advocates, the Obama administration’s top official for federal initiatives with historically Black schools on Thursday urged MSI leaders to broaden their focus on educating policymakers about their record of achievement.
For too long MSIs have cajoled Congress with the cautious violin-playing they hoped would inspire funding, said Dr. John Silvanus Wilson, executive director of the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities, during the “What the Higher Education Community Can Learn from Minority-serving Institutions” forum sponsored by the Lumina Foundation and Education Sector, a Washington-based independent education policy think tank.
But it’s time to bust out the trumpets: 'We have to tell our story better,' Wilson said about MSIs, which grant degrees to a majority of students of color yet are chronically underfunded.
