Is there a worse problem for a school to have these days?

Hannah Sparks of Boston.com.

Boston University, MLK’s Alma Mater, Is Just 3 Percent Black

At the alma mater of Martin Luther King, Jr., the black student population is only three percent.

Boston University is located, of course, in Boston, a city where 24 percent of the population is black. It is among many prominent area schools — including Northeastern, MIT, and Tufts — where the number of black students remains in the single digits, according to The Boston Globe.

The nationwide average is 15 percent.

Many students from diverse high schools say they feel culture shock upon arriving in the city.

“I definitely felt my skin color and that I was different like never before,” a BU student from Atlanta told the Globe.

One the challenges school administrators said they face bolstering those numbers is intense competition and lack of qualified applicants, but a University of Pennsylvania professor studying diversity in higher education said ineffective recruitment, a lack of encouragement by high school guidance counselors, and racist stereotypes about the city dating back to the busing crisis of the 1970s play a role as well.