Support HBCUs
The schools have done much to uplift the Black community, and more funding is key.
Ruth Simmons’ academic career is nothing short of remarkable, with a trajectory that includes top posts at some of the country’s most elite universities and a groundbreaking stint as president of Brown University, where she was the first African American to lead an Ivy League institution.
She credits an historically Black college — Dillard University in New Orleans — with laying the “foundation that I needed as a young person to go on and do the things that I’ve done in my career.”
That’s one reason Simmons was lured out of retirement to assume the presidency of Prairie View A&M, one of the nation’s 100 historically black colleges and universities, or HBCUs. The schools “continually punch above their weight and they deserve some respect for that,” Simmons told the editorial board.
Indeed, they do. HBCUs have done a lion’s share in uplifting the Black community, producing generations of professionals, pioneers and community leaders, and boosting the overall economy, even as they remained undervalued and underfunded.
Consider: The combined funding for every four-year HBCU in America in 2014 was only $1.2 billion, less than the amount received by one single institution, Johns Hopkins University, which claimed $1.6 billion in federal, state and local grants and contracts — a glaring disparity identified by Howard University professor Ivory Toldson.
HBCUs have one-eighth of the average size of endowments of historically white colleges and universities. In Texas, a study by Every Texan, formerly the Center for Public Policy Priorities, found that the state’s two four-year HBCUs — Prairie View A&M and Texas Southern University — receive $2,500 less per student in state funding than Texas A&M University and the University of Texas at Austin, its two flagship institutions.
The struggle for equitable funding has only been amplified by the pandemic. Addressing it, at long last, must be a priority for the Biden administration and the Texas Legislature this session.
Despite struggles with finances and declining enrollment, HBCUs have given generations of Black Americans access to higher education and opportunities they may have been denied elsewhere.
Representing just 3 percent of four-year colleges, HBCUs have helped build the country’s Black middle class, producing 80 percent of Black judges, 50 percent of black lawyers and doctors, 27 percent of Black college graduates with a degree in STEM and 50 percent of Black teachers. Vice President Kamala Harris and the Rev. Raphael Warnock, the first Black senator from Georgia, are also HBCU graduates.
HBCUs are also mobility drivers: While more than 70 percent of HBCU students rely on federal Pell Grants, students are more likely to graduate than those attending mostly white colleges, according to a 2018 study, and graduates on average pass their family income level six years later.
The role of HBCUs in supporting and nurturing Black students has become even more important during the presidency of Trump, whose racist rhetoric deepened divisions and stirred unrest, and amid the social justice movement sparked by the killings of Black people by police.
Enrollment at HBCUs increased after Trump was elected, according to a study by researchers affiliated with Rutgers University. Students surveyed said experiences with racism drew them to the schools, along with concerns about safety at predominantly white institutions.
In Texas, the state public HBCUs — Prairie View and Texas Southern University — accounted for about one-fourth of Black students enrolled at four-year public institutions last fall.
Unlike mainstream institutions, which operate on an “elimination process” that requires certain prerequisites before allowing students to enter highly competitive fields of study, HBCUs better serve the needs of Black students who may come from disadvantaged schools.
Simmons describes the philosophy: “Don’t judge students on the advantage of whether or not they had an AP course, but judge them on the basis of whether or not they might, with some coursework, rise to the level of where you want to see them.”
President Trump bragged about saving HBCUs by signing bipartisan legislation that made permanent $255 million in annual STEM funding for HBCUs and other minority-serving colleges, but in actuality, the work was done by Congress and for a program started under George W. Bush, and annual funding changed little from the Obama administration.
President Joe Biden has pledged $70 billion in new funding for HBCUs and other minority-serving institutions under an agenda crafted in part by Harris. That is impressive — as was MacKenzie Scott’s donation of more than half a billion dollars to HBCUs, including Prairie View, which will get $50 million.
Both bring much-needed attention to the schools, which need to attract more donors and funding to build endowments.
Achieving parity will require more than just a promise or even an incremental funding boost. HBCUs have been underfunded for decades — and it will take an intentional infusion of new, devoted funding to overcome the favoritism long enjoyed by predominantly white institutions.
And since navigating onerous bureaucracy often shuts out understaffed schools from funding, agencies should cut the red tape for applying.
History tells us what countless studies have shown: HBCUs contribute to the economy and the progress of our country. Equitable investment in them will pay off for everyone.