When Ghanaian-British rapper Stormzy is not busy making hit records such as “Vossi Bop” and “Shut Up”, he’s helping Black students get into one of the most prestigious universities in the world. Last year, the rapper launched his own scholarship which aims to provide funding for Black students wanting to be admitted into Cambridge University. According to AllHipHop, the rapper has been credited with a 50 percent increase in the admissions of Black students at the top-tier university. The phenomenon has now been dubbed the “Stormzy effect”.
Watch Stormzy Deliver a Cover of ‘Brown Skin Girl’
Speaking about his scholarship and why he felt the need to help Black students, Stormzy said that, “In school and college I had the ability and was almost destined to go to one of the top universities. But that didn’t happen for myself… so hopefully there’s another young Black student out there that can have that opportunity through my scholarship.” He went on to add that, “I always said that there’s a whole bunch of academically brilliant, excellent students who also need an incentive.”
The Guardian reports that Cambridge University has been under heavy fire for its lack of diversity. Last year, statistics showed that the institution had failed to admit a single Black British student at more than one in four of its colleges during 2015 and 2017. David Lammy, the Labor MP for Tottenham, continued his calls for elite universities to increase diversity among students by saying that, “We need transparency if we are going to have progress on access to our elite institutions for students from disadvantaged and under-represented backgrounds.”
