ABOUT NJ MED
In 1995, we formed New Jersey Minority Educational Development (NJ MED), as a nonprofit organization to help develop practical solutions to the problems of minority youths development in public education, and to foster higher education and career pursuit aimed at enhancing positive growth within the minority community. We strongly believe that our nation’s public educational system has to be the catalyst to rescue this community, and is the central issue which will define our nation’s growth in the 21st century. To that end, in 1996, we’ve created a grassroots educational campaign to help the country close its academic achievement and attainment gaps in our national public educational system, in an effort, towards building a stronger minority workforce that will help in improving our nation’s economic sovereign during this period. The campaign contained several specific objectives to which we will give particular attention. These include:
1) improving the national high school and college graduation rates of minority males.
2) improving our national educational system in information technology and its application for minority students from early childhood through post-secondary education.
3) maximizing all our nation’s resources to reach these two objectives towards reestablishing America’s educational position as number one in the world by the end of the 21st century.
We deeply believe that if the objectives we have outlined for this campaign can be both understood and acted on by institutions of higher education, our business leaders, and the people who have public responsibility in the matter, we could save the U.S. economy over several billion dollars a year by cutting the cost of adult and juvenile incarceration, public health care costs, and at the same time, increase tax revenues, and provide over 600,000 new high-skill workers into the U.S. workforce by 2040, and an additional 60,000 workers per year after that period.
We are aware that the campaign’s objectives are long term in nature and will require at least several decades to measure their impact. However, the campaign’s first objective of increasing high school and college graduating rates of minority males could provide immediate returns within 10 years (if the top universities and corporations in the United States participated). We have already test marketed a multi-purpose high school drop-out prevention program model entitled the 100% Graduation Rate Program with a high level of success in one of our nation’s most depressed areas. This report’s following sections will explain why we targeted this population and how we achieved of some of our preliminary goals.