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African American females make up two-thirds of African American postsecondary enrollments and 60% of all African Americans with at least a bachelor's degree. How do brothers and sisters with shared experiences have such markedly different outcomes? I find that African American females are more likely than African American males to apply to college, to attend college, and to attend two-year colleges, four-year colleges, and selective colleges. Students' backgrounds, academic achievement, and Catholic school attendance explains the differences in the type of colleges African American females and males attend, but fail to explain differences in college application and attendance rates.

Research shows that family is influential to African Americans in college choice (Chapman et al., 2018; Chapman et al., 2020; Freeman, 2005; Hines et al., 2019; Lowry, 2017; Williams, 2018). However, it often overlooks unique, African-rooted characteristics of African American families and culture. This study aimed to explore whether and how these characteristics shape college choice for these students.

Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with six, first-year African American students at an urban university. The data were analyzed using theoretical thematic analysis.

The major themes showed the influence of family, community and spirituality in shaping participants’ college choice decisions and perception of higher education.

In addition to identifying specific family members who were influential to African Americans in college choice, this work highlighted the role of communities as a whole in shaping these students’ decisions and creating supportive environments. It also showed the importance of these students’ relationship with God through the college choice process. The work can guide researchers and educators in considering African American families and culture as strengths in helping these students through college choice.

This paper explores some of the recent developments and transformations in Africa's higher education.

It employs an extensive review of literature based on some dominant thematic areas characterizing the main trends and developments in Africa's higher education.

The paper mainly highlights the impacts of academic partnerships on these transformations, with a focus on research, postgraduate training, mobility and some new intra-African initiatives. Following the unprecedented effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, digitalization comes out as an important turning point for Africa's higher education, which should be exploited for more opportunities. The paper calls for collaborative efforts to address the challenges facing Africa's higher education for the repositioning of Africa as a meaningful player in the unfolding global knowledge society.

The outcomes could be useful to researchers focused on international education, policymakers and higher education leaders and international development partners working on higher education in Africa. It could also be useful for structuring future collaborations between Africa and other regions of the world.

The paper calls for enhanced and mutually beneficial collaborations and disruption of the imbalances that have characterised North–South collaborations. It proposes some possible approaches and alternatives that could be used for redress.

The paper is original and relies on some of the new developments in Africa, including the impacts of COVID-19 and digitalization on the future of higher education collaborations with Africa.

This paper draws on African anti-colonial thought and Black consciousness to propose critical conscious leadership (CCL) as a decolonising leadership approach appropriate for pursuing emancipation, social justice and innovation in a new African university.

I utilised the method of critical discourse analysis to study Ihron Rensburg’s language as he reflected on his leadership at the University of Johannesburg (UJ). The study engaged with Rensburg’s writings and texts on his account of leading the merger and transformation of UJ. The primary text draws from his book “Serving Higher Purposes” (2020).

Through the construction of CCL, the paper proposes alternative tenets for leading transformation towards a new African university. CCL grounds a decolonised and pluriversal new African university’s character premised on a consciously revitalised alternative thinking that will carry the communitarian spirit of Africa in knowledge production, dissemination and consumption in humanising all and serving the greater good. And it operates within the dialectical tensions of the social and economic purpose of higher education (HE), African and global relevance, African and Western paradigms, excellent performance and attainment of social justice.

The proposed CCL offers an alternative leadership approach that responds to the call to “Dethrone the Empire” by centring Blackness in HE leadership, which is crucial for authentic transformation and decolonisation.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the effect of off-balance sheet activities on the credit risk of African banks.

The theory about the relationship between off-balance sheet activities and bank risk was used to construct a conceptual model of the effect of off-balance sheet on credit risk in an African context. The accounting approach is chosen by collecting accounting data extracted from the annual reports of 24 private and conventional African banks during the period 2010–2019. Both statistical and empirical studies are conducted. The statistical study aims to give a description of sample banks in terms of off-balance sheet activities and key financial indicators. The empirical study has the goal of exploring the correlations between, on the one hand, credit risk and, on the other hand, off-balance sheet ratio and control variables (bank- and country-specific variables). This study is based on dynamic panels using the two-step generalized method of moments technique to estimate regressions between credit risk and the explanatory variables.

The statistical study reveals that sample banks use moderately off-balance sheet activities; most of them use essentially guarantees and letters of credit, have satisfactory financial indicators and are slightly exposed to credit risk. The empirical results from the two-step generalized method of moments technique disclose that off-balance sheet activities have an intensifying effect on the credit risk of African banks. However, the increasing effect can be minimized when African banks use moderately off-balance sheet activities.

Using judiciously off-balance sheet activities does not exacerbate the exposure of African banks to credit risk. Therefore, managers of African banks are recommended to maintain a moderate level of off-balance sheet activities, especially guarantees and letters of credit.

The findings of this study eliminate the opacity about the effect of off-balance sheet activities on credit risk. Moreover, this study fulfills the huge gap in the related literature by completing the scarcity of recent studies, considering all items of the off-balance sheet, focusing on the African context, describing off-balance sheet activities and financial indicators of sample banks due to a statistical study and estimating regressions of dynamic panels between credit risk and both bank-specific and country-specific variables due to a two-step generalized method of moments technique.

Consistent research highlighting their utility for documenting historical protest events find social movement scholars relying heavily on newspapers. Simultaneously, research consistently finds racial bias in the media. Together, these findings suggest that scholars’ reliance on mainstream media accounts of protest by minority groups could lead to inaccurate histories and explanations. This chapter compares reports of a six-year-long protest case featuring African American activists found in both a mainstream media source, the New York Times, and two New York-based African American newspapers, the New York Amsterdam News and the New York Age, which were then triangulated with data from archival manuscript collections. Doing so revealed considerable and important differences. The ethnic press reported more protest events than the New York Times, which contained descriptive bias reflecting existing racial stereotypes and effectively silenced activists. These findings suggest that social movement scholars focusing on minority activists should engage in both ethnic and mainstream press accounts of protest events and political activity to ensure accurate descriptions of events and activist sentiments.

Introduction. This study examined the association between self-rated physical and oral health, cigarette smoking, and history of criminal justice contact (i.e., never arrested; arrested, but never incarcerated; or incarcerated in reform school, detention, jail, or prison) among African American men and women. Methods. We conducted descriptive statistical, linear regression, and multinomial regression analyses of the African American subsample (n = 3,570) from the National Survey of American Life (2001–2003). Results. Overall, African American women reported lower arrest rates and histories of incarceration than African American men. Additionally, we found that criminal justice contact was associated with lower self-rated physical health and oral health and higher levels of smoking for both men and women. African American women who had been arrested and detained in facilities other than jail had more chronic health problems than their male counterparts. Furthermore, having been arrested or spent time in a reform school, detention center, jail, or prison significantly increased the odds of African American men being a current smoker. Lastly, among African American women, those who had any level of criminal justice contact were likely to be current smokers and former smokers compared to those without a history of criminal justice contact. Conclusion. Addressing the health of African Americans with criminal justice contact is a critical step in reducing health disparities and improving the overall health and well-being of African American men and women. Furthermore, attention to differences by gender and specific types of criminal justice contact are important for a more precise understanding of these relationships.

This chapter focuses on successful strategies for increasing the number of males who enter and succeed in science at the college level. These strategies reflect lessons we have learned over the years from the Meyerhoff Scholars Program, launched in 1989, for high-achieving African American students in science and engineering at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC).

The African continent is filled with a textured history, vast resources, and immense opportunity. The landscape of higher education on such a diverse continent is extensive and complex. In this review of the landscape, four primary topics are evaluated. The historical context is the foundational heading, which briefly covers the evolution from colonization to independence and the knowledge economy. The second main heading builds upon the historical context to provide an overview of the numerous components of higher education, including language diversity, institutional type, and access to education. A third section outlines key challenges and opportunities including finance, governance, organizational effectiveness, and the academic core. Each of these challenges and opportunities is interconnected and moves from external influences (e.g., fiscal and political climate) to internal influences (e.g., administrative leadership and faculty roles). The last layer of the landscape focuses on leveraging higher education in Africa for social and economic progress and development. Shaping a higher education system around principles of the public good and generating social benefits is important for including postsecondary institutions in a development strategy.

This chapter analyses interviews with 13 African scholars from a range of countries who are currently working at a South African university. The interviews explore aspects of their migration journeys and the role that language, particularly the English language, has played in their mobility. The majority of the participants originate from English-speaking African countries, and are fluent English speakers. English is currently the international language of the academy, and English fluency can almost be seen as a prerequisite for an international academic career. The driving question behind this research is what have these African highly skilled academic migrants gained and lost from English in terms of their mobility, careers and identities? The participants show complex orientations towards the medium. On the one hand, English is recognised as an enabling medium for international success in academia, and for career and educational opportunities aboard. On the other hand, participants perceive that the emphasis on the English medium has negative effects on their relationships with their home languages and their home countries. The research raises questions about the role of English in higher education in Africa.