Historically Black Graduate Institutions (HBGI) Abstracts

For 85 years, North Carolina Central University School of Law has remained true to its mission “to provide opportunities for African Americans to become lawyers…and to provide a high quality, personalized, practice-oriented and affordable legal education to historically underrepresented students from diverse backgrounds in order to help diversify the legal profession [and] to become highly competent and socially responsible lawyers and leaders committed to public service and to meeting the needs of underserved communities."

The priorities of the Law School are to increase the indicators for future incoming classes, decrease attrition and improve retention, strengthen critical legal analysis skills throughout the three- or four-year program of legal education, provide targeted support for at-risk students, improve first-time bar state and overall bar passage rates, improve, and enhance career placement for graduates, and the two foci for the 2024–2029 Title III five-year plan are as follows:

1. Academic quality and
2. Student success.

Areas targeted for improvement are academic quality, student outcomes, and program and objective assessment. Additionally, one existing program, the tutorial program, will be overhauled to assist students in first-year and upper-level doctrinal classes to develop the skills and understanding of the subject matter by providing targeted objective and essay practice that incorporate strategies and tactics that improve performance on summative assessments.

A lab model will be implemented with exercises that directly align with their coverage in doctrinal classes. The labs will be required for all students and will further enrich their learning in required, bar-tested courses. The Title III grant also awards scholarships, fellowships, and other financial assistance for needy graduate and professional students to permit the enrollment of the students in and completion of the doctoral degree in medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, veterinary medicine, law, and the doctorate degree in the physical or natural sciences, engineering, mathematics, or other scientific disciplines in which African Americans are underrepresented.

The Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Integrated Biosciences program at North Carolina Central University focuses on furthering our understanding of the biological and behavioral mechanisms underlying biomedical diseases. Students are provided with two curricular tracks: Biomedical Sciences and Pharmaceutical Sciences. Students in the program are offered the opportunity to complete coursework and pursue dissertation research in a plethora of disciplines in the biosciences, including studying the complex issues associated with the pervasiveness of diseases that contribute to an unequal health burden in underrepresented populations, known commonly as health disparities. The specific goals of the Integrated Biosciences (INBS) Ph.D. degree program at NCCU are to prepare students to investigate biologically relevant research questions through the mastery of chemistry, pharmaceutical, biomedical and biological sciences; increase the number of biomedical and pharmaceutical scientists conducting research using the latest biomedical and pharmaceutical science technologies; and increase the number of scientists and faculty specializing in the study of the molecular and behavioral basis of human diseases, especially as related to health disparities.