Ah…I remember the movie, School Daze. Spike Lee did an excellent job displaying the dynamics of colorism between sororities and how fraternities used their position to exploit black women. This movie, and the hit television series, A Different World, put HBCU’s (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) on the radar. Many black women of my generation have gone there, and still many came after. But many of us learned that the reality was a lot different than what we saw on the screen. While it is true that many HUBCU’s are excellent institutes of higher learning, there’s another part of the college experience–the romantic and marriage prospects–are often preposterously skewed in favor of the men over the women.

While researching data on the upcoming course, The Pink Pill for College, I ran across a 2014 study that gave some pretty grim prospects for black women who attended HBCU’s. And while the very nature of these universities centers around race, the challenges have nothing to do with it. The challenges come not from the focus on race, but of the abysmal ratios. In a study published in the Society of Emerging Adulthood, “Factors Influencing Dating Experiences Among African American Emerging Adults,” where I discovered that the ratio of black women to black men is as wide as 6 to 1. Yes; six black women to every ONE black man. For young black female students who aspire for both a degree and potentially a good marriage match will most likely leave with a degree and an extremely skewed mindset about dating and marriage dynamics in the black community.

Based on the data provided in the study,  I created a list of reasons young black women might want to reconsider attending all-black colleges and universities.