Getting To Know: Morgan State University (MD)

Published by Stuart Nachbar at June 2, 2025

Interest in Morgan State is growing.

In the fall of 2016, Morgan State attracted 6,100 applicants for just over 1,100 seats in the Class of 2020. Fast forward to this past fall, the university attracted over 23,000 applicants for nearly 2,400 seats in the Class of 2028. Acceptance rates also rose from 60 to 81 percent.

This suggests that while interest and enrollments have gone up at Morgan State, the yield rate, the percentage of accepted students who enroll, has gone down. However, part of this might be due to outreach. For the past four admissions cycles over half of the incoming freshmen have come from outside Maryland. Within Maryland, most of the students come from Baltimore City and the neighboring countries. However, the university can house less than a third of the undergraduate student body on campus. While my tour group got a sense of where students lived off campus if they did not come from Baltimore, the ieghborhood around the campus had its sketchy spots.

Like most public Historically Black schools, Morgan State starts with a low sticker price.

This coming fall tuition and fees will be just under $8,400 for Maryland residents and just under $20,000 for non-residents. For comparison sake Towson University charged $11,700 to residents this fall and nearly $30,000 to non-residents. For the Class of 2026, the last year I could find information using College Navigator, ninety one percent of the class received some form of institutional scholarship that averaged over $5,000.

There are two main scholarships. the Troy E. Quinn Merit Award (up to $5,000) and the J.C. Bozeman Award, a $2,000 need-based award for non-residents. The Jenkins Scholarship for Honors College admits is essentially a full ride: tuition & fees, room & board, and $500/semester for books and academic essentials. Those who do not receive these awards can apply for Academic Works grants on a semester by semester basis. The Jenkins Scholarships requires maintaining a 3.6 GPA. The Bozeman and Quinn awards are much easier to keep. They require maintaining only a 2.0 GPA.

However, retention and graduation rates are low.

Freshman retention has not been above 75 percent since 2016, though it has managed to be no less than 70 percent. Only about a fifth of a class graduates on time. Given that Morgan State is not exceptionally selective, admissions and scholarships appear to be as much about potential as they are about pre-college academic achievement. Six-year graduation rates have been below 50 percent, which suggests a high transfer-out/withdrawal rate.

Morgan State is a relatively comprehensive university.

This school offers 60 undergraduate majors as well as a nice selection of pre-professional minors. Majors that are tough to find at many schools include Cloud Computing, Cybersecurity Intelligence Management, Family Consumer Sciences, Interior Design, Mechatronics Engineering and Multiplatform Production. It’s also quite possible to pair liberal arts majors with a business minor, which is not easy to do at many other public universities.

All students must complete 40 credits of general education requirements , a two-credit fitness course, plus an orientation course for their major. Everyone must take a lab based and a non lab based science course. It looks fairly easy to overlap general education requirements with most majors or minors.

Morgan State is ‘Baltimore’s Football School’.

Morgan State competes in 13 NCAA D-1 sports, but football has the highest profile.This is the only university within Baltimore City to field an NCAA D-1 varsity scholarship football team. As a member of the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference, Howard is Morgan State’s clearest geographic rival among Historically Black Colleges & Universities (HBCUs). Towson University is likely Morgan State’s closest rival that is not an HBCU.

Morgan State was one of the dominant HBCUs when I started to follow football in the late 1960’s. Hall of Famers Leroy Kelly (Browns and Raiders) and Willie Lanier (Chiefs) are former Bears. If you’re a Kansas City Chiefs fan, you saw Willie Lanier on the field following the Chiefs 32-29 win over Buffalo to get into their third straight Super Bowl.

What did I like most about Morgan State ?

My favorite things about this school were:

The students I met. They seemed genuinely proud of Morgan State as well as quite motivated. Considering that most students do not live on campus, there seemed to be a lot of school spirit shown during a football season–including the marching band–on a fairly urban campus.
There was a feeling that “we’re not perfect, but we’re truly trying” that starts with addressing affordability and student life. I felt that people cared.
The pre-propfessional academic choices seem more responsive to market demands than I have seen at many other schools.
Morgan State is well connected to the Baltimore-Washington business and technology community.
I like how this school showcases the history. Morgan State has strong connections to the civil rights movement in our.country. I dropped a couple of photos below.

There are also nice examples of modern architecture on this campus, as shown below. Morgan State’s campus is about half the size of Goucher College, which has far fewer students. Yet it packs far more resources onto its footprint.

What did I like least?

Morgan State’s campus appears to be built up on hills, not immediately fronting streets. Overpasses connect the academic and residential centers of campus. I’m not a fan of overpasses, though I understand why they are there. It’s better to have people walk briskly over a street than to wait at traffic lights to cross. However, they also shake beneath your feet due to the traffic below and are harder to walk in cold weather. The campus layout reminded me of Hofstra University, another school that has perceptually long bridges between the academic and residential centers.

I also cannot ignore that there was a shooting on this campus 13 months before I visited in which four students and a fifth person who was not a student were shot and injured during the university’s homecoming week. The shooter, who was not a student, was arrested ten days later. A second shooter was found and arrested over a month later. Since then, the university has increased security measures for homecoming events, including the use of drones and over 3,000 cameras..

Finally, I had to be concerned that the high level of aid might not be sustainable long term, given the rising percentage of students from other states.

Conclusions

I really like the intentions, value and spirit at Morgan State and found much to admire about the university But it really helps to be comfortable, or at least familiar, with city life before you come.

Given that Towson University is in a neighboring community as well as a different county, and other public institutions in the Charm City have smaller enrollments, Morgan State is Baltimore’s most important public city University.

Report Card: Morgan State University

Four-Year/Six-Year Graduation Rates: C-/C-
Freshman Retention: C
Costs: B+
Curriculum: A
Community: B+
Comforts: B
Connections: A (Baltimore/Washington)/C (Elsewhere)

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