Eleise Richards is making waves with her venture to introduce HBCUs to students who are unfamiliar with the institutions.
The New Jersey resident told ‘Good Morning America,’ “I didn’t know about HBCUs. I didn’t grow up in a school system that taught us or encouraged us to attend HBCUs. I only knew about Howard because my best friend told me she wanted to go.”
Richards, a Howard University alumna, started a college fair in 2016 that has since grown into the nonprofit organization Experience the Legacy.
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She wanted to make it possible for other students to find their ideal HBCUs without spending money, based on her experience as a first-generation college student and the daughter of Jamaican immigrants who were unfamiliar with the American college system.
“I wanted to make sure students from neighborhoods and communities that look like mine, have the real information, have the resources, have the access to recruiters, to alumni, to learn more about these schools and truly assess whether it’s a good fit for them and consider them when they’re thinking about their future college journey,” Richards expressed.
But after managing the fairs for two years, she started to feel “disingenuous” when she discovered how little she actually knew about the majority of HBCUs that sent representatives to highlight their campuses.
She, therefore, started her “bucket list” tour in 2020 intending to see as many HBCUs as she could. She divided her trip into three parts, beginning with all the East Coast colleges from New Jersey to North Carolina.
From institutions like Alabama State University in Montgomery, Alabama, and Prairie View A&M University in Prairie View, Texas, to Elizabeth City State University in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, in the fall of 2023, the 35-year-old was able to fulfill her goal of visiting every four-year HBCU and a few community colleges within the connected states.
“In total, it ended up being 93 schools, every four-year degree-granting HBCU in North America,” Richards disclosed.
She said of the schools she visited, “It’s very diverse. It’s not made up of just Black and brown students. There are students from all walks of life, all types of different countries. There’s just a lot of misconceptions out there.”
