Penn and Wharton Black Students and a Visiting Guide: Wharton, and the City Around It
Benjamin Franklin built a university for people who intended to do things. This University of Pennsylvania Wharton black students visiting guide covers Locust Walk, the Du Bois College House, the first business school on earth, and a Black Philadelphia that is part of the education.
Every Ivy sells contemplation; Penn sells momentum. Our University of Pennsylvania Wharton black students visiting guide is for the family whose child is already asking what a degree is for — the future founder, financier, physician or advocate who wants a great city under the campus instead of a fence around it.
Penn sits in West Philadelphia, twenty minutes' walk from Center City's towers, and it has always treated that as curriculum rather than compromise. Bring comfortable shoes and an appetite: this is the most urban education in the Ivy League, and for the right student it is not close.
Franklin's Practical University
Penn traces its origins to 1740, and its character to one man. Benjamin Franklin — printer, inventor, diplomat — reshaped the charity school of 1740 into an academy built on a heretical idea for its century: educate young people in English, in modern subjects, for public service and practical life, not for the ministry alone.
Penn's own history page describes the result as a heritage "closely bound with the birth of the United States," carried today on a 299-acre West Philadelphia campus of more than 180 buildings, where College Hall, completed in 1873, was the first building on the present site.
The university's list of firsts is the Franklin temperament made institutional: America's first medical school, its first teaching hospital, the nation's first student union, the world's first electronic large-scale digital computer — and, the one your family will hear most, the world's first collegiate business school.
That school is Wharton, and its founding is documented in Penn's archives with a banker's precision: in 1881 Joseph Wharton, an ironmaster and self-taught businessman, gave $100,000 to found a "School of Finance and Economy" meant to prepare young men honestly for the strife of business life.
Wharton began awarding MBAs in 1921 and became, in the university's own phrase, the height Franklin never envisioned.
The university's summary of the school today describes it as founded in 1881 as the first collegiate business school, recognised globally across every major discipline of business education — with, in that summary's figures, 5,000 students across its undergraduate, MBA, executive and doctoral programmes.
For our readers the translation is simple: if your child wants to study business as an undergraduate — not economics at a distance, but finance, marketing, management and entrepreneurship from the first year — Wharton is the original article, and its undergraduates sit inside the same school as the MBAs.
The Scholar Who Mapped Black Philadelphia
Penn's deepest Black chapter was written by a man the university would not hire as a professor — and it tells the story itself, now, with the respect it owes.
In 1896 W. E. B. Du Bois, fresh from becoming the first African American to earn a Harvard Ph.D., came to Philadelphia as an assistant instructor to study the Black population of the city's Seventh Ward.
The result, published by Penn Press in 1899, was The Philadelphia Negro, credited as the first scientific study of race in the world — exhaustive, empirical, meticulous, in Penn Today's words. Du Bois left for Atlanta University, founded modern sociology there, published The Souls of Black Folk in 1903 and helped found the NAACP in 1909.
And more than a century later, Penn's trustees voted to name him Honorary Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies — the university formally writing him into the faculty he had been denied.
A family touring Penn should know both halves of that story, because the campus your child would enter is the second half: the one with a college house carrying his name at its centre.
Du Bois College House: Small House, Big Voice
Black Penn was built, as at every Ivy, substantially by Black students themselves.
Penn admitted its first African American students in 1879 but remained, as the Penn Gazette's history of the house puts it, an extremely white institution for most of the next ninety years; when admissions policy changed in 1967 to recruit more Black students, their numbers more than tripled within three years — and those students set about building the supports they needed.
The university's own college-house history records that both the Afro-American Studies Program and the Du Bois College House were implemented in 1972, initiated by Black undergraduates, with a sophomore named Cathy Barlow among the pioneers who pressed the administration and researched the solutions.
The house stands today as a residential community devoted to African and African American culture within Penn's college-house system — faculty, programming, a gallery, and a family-reunion tradition among its alumni that the Gazette describes in the language of kinship, because that is what it is.
"Small House, BIG Voice"— The house chant of W. E. B. Du Bois College House, per Penn's College Houses
Around the house stands the wider architecture of Black life at Penn: an Africana Studies programme that descends directly from the 1972 settlement, a Black Alumni Society that shows up for the house's anniversaries, and — inside Wharton itself — a Black Wharton Undergraduate Association listed among the school's student organisations, alongside the Wharton African American MBA Association at the graduate level.
The MBA programme, for its part, runs a dedicated HBCU Virtual Visit Day introducing HBCU students and alumni to, in its own listing, "the academic, social, and cultural life of the Wharton MBA experience" — a pipeline our HBCU families should know exists by name.
The through-line a visiting family should test on the ground: at Penn, Black community is not a club fair afterthought. It has an address, a chant, and fifty years of residents.
The Alumni Proof: From the Seventh Ward to the EGOT
Penn's Black alumni story runs from scholarship to the summit of show business without changing its character — Penn people do things in public.
The Seventh Ward study gives the line its ancestor in Du Bois himself, and its statesman in Kwame Nkrumah, the Penn alumnus who led Ghana to independence and invited Du Bois to Accra in his last years — a connection Penn Today notes in a single clause that contains a century.
The modern proof is a singer from Springfield, Ohio, who arrived at Penn at sixteen as John Stephens.
Wharton's own newsroom records that John Legend graduated magna cum laude from the College of Arts and Sciences in 1999, with a bachelor's degree in English with an emphasis on African-American literature — a course of study, note, that sits squarely inside the tradition Du Bois founded at Penn.
As a student he directed a church choir and presided over the Counterparts a cappella group; after graduation he took the consulting job a Penn graduate was "supposed" to take, then left it for music.
PhillyVoice records the summit: in 2018 Legend became the first Black man, and the youngest artist, to reach EGOT status — Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony. When your child asks what a Penn education is for, the honest answer includes: whatever you decide it is for. The university's job is to make the deciding formidable.
Attending: The Numbers, Attributed
The ledger, with sources attached, as this magazine requires.
CollegeData's profile of Penn, drawn from the university's published data, lists 9,989 undergraduates, an overall admission rate of five percent of 72,544 applicants, a cost of attendance of $99,082 — tuition and fees of $73,978, room and board of $20,604 — an average of 100 percent of demonstrated need met, and Black or African American students at 10.5 percent of the student body in its figures, among the higher shares in the Ivy League.
Other published tallies of the most recent cycle, citing Penn's own admissions announcement, put the acceptance rate at 5.4 percent; treat the honest figure as roughly one applicant in twenty, varying by school and by year. Two structural facts matter more than the decimals.
Penn's four undergraduate schools — the College, Wharton, Engineering and Nursing — admit separately, so a Wharton application is judged against the business pool, not the whole university.
And Penn's aid is need-based: the published average freshman award in CollegeData's figures runs above $70,000, which is why this magazine repeats, in every guide in this series, the same instruction — run the net-price calculator for your family's actual numbers before the sticker price talks you out of a school your child may have been born to attend.
Two more Penn facts belong in a family's notebook.
The first is recent and quietly historic: when the Du Bois College House marked its fiftieth anniversary, the Pennsylvania Gazette's account notes that the university was being led by its first Black president, interim president Wendell Pritchett, who told the house's alumni that the university owed a debt of gratitude to the legions of Du Bois residents who had worked together to build the community — a president of the university saying, in print, that the house's founders were owed thanks.
The second is a walk your family can take.
Penn Today describes how Du Bois's Seventh Ward has been brought back to life as a teaching, research and public-history project — "The Ward" — complete with a curriculum, documentaries, a mural and a walking tour of the Seventh Ward, the very streets where Du Bois conducted his house-by-house survey in the 1890s.
Build an hour for it into your visit. A student who has stood in the Seventh Ward understands what Penn scholarship is for in a way no brochure can teach.
And a word on choosing the door, because Penn, like Cornell, admits by school. The four undergraduate schools — Arts and Sciences, Wharton, Engineering and Nursing — run separate admissions, and the university's visitors programme reflects the structure, offering classroom visits in the College of Arts and Sciences, Penn Engineering and the School of Nursing alongside the general tour.
The Franklin design rewards the student who crosses those borders once enrolled — Penn students routinely study across the university's twelve schools — but the application itself must be aimed. A young founder applies to Wharton and is read as a Wharton candidate; a young scientist applies to the College or Engineering and is read there.
Families should spend the autumn before application deciding which Penn their child is actually asking for. It is the most consequential choice in the whole file, and it is entirely within your control.
Visiting: Locust Walk and the City Around It
Penn is the easiest Ivy visit in America to make well. The university's visitors page offers campus tours and information sessions, classroom visits across the College, Engineering and Nursing, a self-guided walking tour, and a virtual tour for the first look from home.
On the ground, do what Penn students do: enter at College Hall by the Franklin statue, walk Locust Walk end to end — the leafy pedestrian spine where the whole university passes twice a day — and continue into the neighbourhoods.
Stand in front of Du Bois College House and say the chant quietly; your teenager will roll her eyes and remember it forever.
Tour routes in the city guides take in the same spine — Locust Walk, Wharton, the Fisher Fine Arts Library's Venetian Gothic reading room — and the Penn Museum is a genuine world museum sitting on the campus edge, free to make a scholar of any visiting sibling.
For the stay, University City holds hotels at every level within a short walk of the gates, with the Inn at Penn set in the heart of campus itself and Center City's grander houses a bridge away across the Schuylkill.
Then do the thing no other Ivy visit offers: spend the evening in Black Philadelphia — its churches, its restaurants, its music — because at Penn the city is not the distraction from the education. For a great many of our families, it is half the reason to come.
Dartmouth: The Mountain School and Its Black Lineage
Cornell: Any Person, Any Study — the Founding Ground
Howard University: The Mecca
Choosing the School
The First Gate: Preschool
Raising Heirs, Not Dependents
University of Pennsylvania — "Penn's History"
University of Pennsylvania Archives — "Brief History: Wharton School"
Penn Today — "University of Pennsylvania and the Wharton School Launch Penn Wharton China Center"
Penn Today — "W. E. B. Du Bois at Penn"
Penn College Houses — "About Du Bois"
The Pennsylvania Gazette — "House of Resiliency"
Wharton News — "Venture Lab to Honor John Legend"
PhillyVoice — "Penn Alum John Legend Becomes the First Black Man to Reach EGOT Status"
Wharton Undergraduate — "Life at Wharton and Penn"
Wharton MBA — "HBCU Virtual Visit Day"
CollegeData — "University of Pennsylvania Overview"
University of Pennsylvania — "Information for Visitors"
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