High praise from Long Island high schoolers for HBCU tour
Elon Sylvester, 17, a senior at Westbury High School, was so impressed by his visit to Morehouse College as part a Long Island group's tour of HBCUs, he came home and applied for admission next fall.
Credit: Newsday/Steve Pfost
Westbury High School senior Elon Sage Sylvester's praise of a weeklong tour of historically Black colleges and universities was effusive.
"I absolutely loved it," Sylvester, who is known as Sage, said in an interview this week of the tour, sponsored by the Wyandanch-based ETL Chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity Inc.
The 17-year-old senior was among 115 students — most from Long Island, but several from other states, including as far as California — who traveled by bus from Hempstead to Atlanta, stopping at 13 HBCUs along the way. The tour began Oct. 22 and ended Saturday.
Sylvester said, "I got to see so many great colleges" that hadn't been on his radar before. "I got to see Morehouse College. Morehouse was special. It was a place where I saw a lot of well-groomed Black men doing great things in life."
The Atlanta college was a place, he said, "where I felt connected … It felt like a family,"
Sylvester added that meeting Morehouse President David A. Thomas heightened the experience.
"To hear him make words of encouragement made we want to fill out the [college] application and send it right away," which he said he did Monday.
Tani Sylvester, his mother, said she and her husband attended metropolitan-area colleges and didn't have the dorm experience. She liked "how much his eyes were opened to so much about college life he hadn’t thought about before. One thing I was excited about, I was looking for a mentorship group of Black men that were doing something like this."
Sylvester said she was "on board" after finding out about the fraternity's tour. The Wyandanch chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha, the nation's oldest historically Black college fraternity, has been conducting the HBCU tour for 41 years, said chapter President William Mills.
Taniya Mingo Balmir, whose son Xavier Balmir is a 17-year-old senior at Long Island Lutheran High School in Brookville, said her late husband Gregory was a member of the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, as was one of her son's uncles, who informed her about the tour. "And I thought it would be a great experience for Xavier to see and experience historically Black colleges and go on the tour."
Her son wasn't available to comment this week, but Balmir said he loved it. And she gave the tour high marks.
"The tour was really organized and the chapter did a great job of keeping parents informed about what was going on," Balmir said. "They’d send videos at the end of each night so we could see what the children were experiencing. And that was awesome. Students had the opportunity to have on-site admissions." She said her son was accepted at two of the campuses on the tour: Virginia Union University and Virginia State University.
Mills said that seven of the students were accepted at those schools.
"Several of them received scholarship money," he added. "We got really good presentations from the schools," that included talks from university provosts and other representatives, as well as three presidents: from Morehouse, Virginia State University and Morgan State University.
"That says that they value the college tour and value us bringing students to campus and have us see their campus and possibly enroll in their respective universities. That’s important to the students," Mills said.
Already, Mills said, "We have inquiries about the next trip … A lot of excitement is built around going next year."
Mills said the students start off a bit apprehensive, but their comfort level grows, and quickly. Within a day, he said, "everybody's made new friends. They’re all having a great time enjoying it."
Sage Sylvester said he and seven other Westbury High classmates, three boys and four girls, have been telling other students all about it. "I tell everybody the same thing: you just have to experience it yourself. It’s great."
