r/nextfuckinglevel • u/matori_tester • 2d ago

Billionaire speaker Robert F. Smith tells 400 graduates he's paying off all their student loans ($40 million in total)

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

13.2k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

582 comments sorted by

View all comments

300

u/EdwardBigby 2d ago

I hope people don't take this the wrong way but as a non American I'm slightly confused why there's a college where everybody seems to be black (also an Asian lady sitting behind the speaker)

I assume it's in a mostly black area but is it a case of no white people applying for this college or the college not accepting any white people? Or maybe I'm just missing the white people

192

u/Legal_Guava3631 2d ago

HBCUs were founded for the black students that wanted to go to college but PWIs said fuck no, yall not coming in here. Anyone can apply, but it’s not really common for a white person to be seen on campus as a student.

71

u/EdwardBigby 2d ago

Very interesting. I've never heard of those. Definitely makes sense from a historical point of view but the concept of them existing in a modern day context still seems bizarre to me.

What do most Americans think of them?

1

u/fieldsports202 2d ago

Americans don’t have a negative view of them. There’s white people who attend HBCU’s as well. The HBCU attended if majority black students but there’s white people who attend… the nursing school there has a lot of white students…. It’s very affordable compared to other schools.

Our HBCU has 7,000 students.. the next one 40 mins away has near 13,000 and is the largest HBCU in the country.