Readers Choice: Which was more difficult the PWI or the HBCU?

PWI vs HBCU. When I left Mount St Mary's I transferred to Bowie State and a popular question I always received was, "Which school is harder, the white one or the black one?". In a nutshell the PWI was more challenging and not for the reasons you may be thinking. I even asked other students who made the same transition and generally everyone agreed.

When I enrolled in Mount St Mary's University it was strictly for basketball, I never really considered the education. My first class was a statistic filled class with mostly freshmen and a little of everything else. We had an assignment the first day and let me tell you that I did not know anything at all. Not one thing. I stood up and left, class dropped, I had to pick that one up another day. This literally happened in every class, I did not know what was going on. My professors said I should have learned this in high school and I really didn't. That's where i think the difference is in the difficulty. White kids generally come to college better prepared. They learned most of this stuff in high school. Most black schools are behind academically. So when they're letting people in the have to be a little more lenient. They know we didn't learn as much so they are trying to help us and believe it or not most black students coming out of high school need that. It's not that we aren't as smart or are slower learners but you simply do not know what has not been taught to you.

I usually get criticism when I make this claim but a simple quick google search and look at statistics will show that test scores from schools that aren't predominantly white have much lower test scores. I also want to point out that sometimes some teachers can be too lenient at black schools. Here are a couple of examples.

My English courses weren't transferred when I got to Bowie so i tried a little protest by not taking the English 101 class they required me to take as A TWENTY ONE YEAR OLD MAN, if I didn't know college English by that point you shouldn't have let me in the school but let me not go back to that bad place. I willingly took a failing grade in that class and still got a 3.0  without buying any books. I made the deans list without studying outside of class.

You had some teachers at the PWI who would help you out but not enough to get you on the deans list. You had enough to maybe get you to a 2.0. My first GPA in college was a 1.8 and i promise you that I studied harder than I ever did in my life and the best I had ever did there was a 2.3 that I worked terribly hard for. The fact of the matter I wasn't prepared to be a college student at that point, over time I had people put around me that could show me the ropes and for me that's what it comes down to.

Statiscally speaking a PWI is full of college ready kids and an HBCU usually has all mostly black students, with the exception of a few and statistically speaking that means a college full of students who aren't ready for college so which one do you think would be "easier".