Perspectives: AME-affiliated Colleges Need To Band Together in Cluster Endowment Trusts
It has been said that financially struggling AME-affiliated colleges should be allowed to die, leaving the strong to survive. An institutional development officer says small, religious-based colleges can all survive if they tackle fundraising as a coalition.
January 29th, 2008 at 2:14 pm
At the rate these colleges are going, there will probably only be one or two left in 200 years to use the money when it is available. I like the other aspects of the plan though. Free-market, coalition-building strategies like this one will be critical to private and specialty schools in the future and I will be interested to see how this expirement pans out if it is implemented.
February 12th, 2008 at 2:28 pm
Long term global investments and corporate buyouts are both going to be paramount over the next century. With this in mind, former GE vice-chairman Lloyd G. Trotter believes this so that he left his job at GE to join a small, mostly African-American buyout firm called GenNx360 (see January 21, 2008 edition of Businessweek).
With this in mind, if Trotter, a seasoned corporate leader is willing to “think big” and take a big step to leave the comfort of his corporate setting for something he believes in, then maybe an aggressive but patient plan (hence the 200 year investment) might be something these colleges should consider. They could band together and… Possibly choose a modest investment with consistent gains? Hire a firm to handle their investment dollars? Or simply ask some of the top-tier alums who own businesses and have the investment experience to help in this process.
That said, big ideas have big rewards and nothing will happen unless someone takes the first “big”step”.
April 30th, 2008 at 8:01 am
I am concerned with the idea of joing our schools together…any member of the AME Church is well informed that each school has its own unique Identity, and that they all have survived by the inside and outside of the “people” each school also serves a different sector of society…to unite them will cut off and hindge their work as a educating insititution.