HBCUs Are Closing at a Rate of One Per Year — Who Is Sounding the Alarm?

There is a particular kind of silence that descends over a community when one of its oldest institutions begins to die, not the silence of shock, not the silence of grief, but the silence of people who have grown so accustomed to the sound of collapse that they no longer hear it as remarkable. And so it is with America’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities, those 107 remaining institutions that were born in the furnace of exclusion, that educated generations of Black Americans when every other door in the republic was bolted shut, and that are now disappearing from the landscape at a rate of approximately one per year while the nation offers little more than ceremonial praise and performative concern. Since 2000, more than a dozen HBCUs have closed their doors permanently — Knoxville College, St. Paul’s College, Barber-Scotia College, Concordia College Alabama, among others — and a dozen more teeter on the precipice of accreditation loss, enrollment free fall, and financial insolvency. The question is not whether HBCUs are in crisis. The question is why so few people with the power to act seem to care.

Let us begin with a number that should shame every institution of higher learning in this country, every corporation that speaks the language of diversity, every foundation that claims to care about racial equity: all 107 HBCUs in the United States combined have a total endowment of approximately $3.9 billion. Harvard University alone holds an endowment of more than $50 billion. Princeton holds $35 billion. Yale holds $41 billion. The entire HBCU system, educating nearly 300,000 students across two dozen states, possesses less wealth than the interest earned in a single fiscal quarter by any one of these institutions. This is not an accident of history. It is its product.

The endowment gap is the wound from which all other wounds flow. Without endowments, HBCUs cannot offer competitive financial aid, which means they lose the highest-performing students to predominantly white institutions that can afford to recruit them aggressively. Without endowments, they cannot invest in facilities, in laboratories, in the physical infrastructure that accreditation agencies require. Without endowments, they cannot weather enrollment downturns, economic recessions, or the kinds of financial shocks that wealthy institutions absorb without breaking stride. The GAO reported in 2018 that HBCUs had a median endowment of approximately $15,000 per student, compared to a median of approximately $34,000 per student at non-HBCU institutions — and that comparison flatters HBCUs, because it does not account for the massive outliers at the top of the non-HBCU distribution that skew the picture beyond recognition.

The Institutions That Built Black America

Before we speak of crisis, we must speak of legacy, because the scale of what HBCUs have contributed to this nation is so vast that the mind struggles to contain it. These institutions, most of them founded in the decades following emancipation, when formerly enslaved people were building schools with their own hands in communities where it had been illegal to read — these institutions produced 80% of Black judges, 50% of Black lawyers, 50% of Black doctors, 40% of Black engineers, and 40% of Black members of Congress. Spelman and Bennett produced generations of Black women leaders when the Seven Sisters would not admit them. Morehouse produced Martin Luther King Jr., Julian Bond, and Spike Lee. Howard produced Thurgood Marshall and Toni Morrison. Tuskegee produced the fighter pilots who escorted bombers over Nazi Germany while being denied basic civil rights in their own country.

“The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character — that is the goal of true education.”
— Martin Luther King Jr., Morehouse College, Class of 1948

HBCUs represent only 3% of the nation’s colleges and universities, yet they produce 17% of all Black bachelor’s degrees, 24% of Black STEM degrees, and a disproportionate share of Black students who go on to earn doctoral degrees. A 2019 Gallup-UNCF study found that Black graduates of HBCUs reported significantly higher levels of well-being, purpose, and belonging than Black graduates of predominantly white institutions. They were more likely to feel that professors cared about them as individuals, more likely to have had a mentor, more likely to have been actively engaged in their education. These are not sentimental observations. They are measurable outcomes that translate directly into career success and community contribution.

The Perfect Storm

The forces threatening HBCUs are multiple, interlocking, and in some cases contradictory. The first and most obvious is the demographic challenge: the National Center for Education Statistics reports that total HBCU enrollment declined from approximately 326,000 in 2010 to approximately 292,000 in 2020, a drop of more than 10% in a single decade. Some individual institutions have experienced far more dramatic declines. This is not because Black students are choosing not to attend college — Black college enrollment overall has fluctuated but remained substantial — but because they are increasingly choosing predominantly white institutions that can offer superior financial aid packages, more modern facilities, and the perceived prestige advantage that the American marketplace, in its infinite superficiality, continues to assign to institutional wealth.

The irony is bitter and precise: the very civil rights victories that HBCUs helped achieve — the desegregation of higher education, the opening of predominantly white institutions to Black students — created the competitive environment that now threatens HBCUs with extinction. Before Brown v. Board of Education and the subsequent integration of higher education, HBCUs were the only option for most Black students seeking a college degree. After integration, they became one option among many, and they entered that competition with centuries of accumulated disadvantage in resources, facilities, and endowment wealth. They were asked, in effect, to compete in a marathon against runners who had been given a fifty-mile head start, and then criticized when they fell behind.

The second force is the accreditation crisis. Between 2010 and 2023, more than a dozen HBCUs were placed on warning, probation, or had their accreditation revoked entirely by regional accrediting agencies. These agencies judge institutions against standards that were designed for well-resourced universities — financial reserves, student-to-faculty ratios, facility conditions, graduation rates — and HBCUs, carrying the accumulated weight of underfunding, often struggle to meet them. The GAO found that HBCUs were disproportionately likely to be sanctioned by accrediting agencies, even when accounting for institutional size and mission. Accreditation loss is a death sentence: without it, students cannot access federal financial aid, and without federal financial aid, the overwhelmingly low-income student body that most HBCUs serve simply cannot attend.

The Alumni Giving Crisis

There is a third factor that is less comfortable to discuss but no less important: alumni giving rates at HBCUs are among the lowest in higher education. The UNCF reports that the average alumni giving rate at HBCUs hovers around 8-12%, compared to 15-20% at comparable non-HBCU institutions and far higher at elite universities. This is not, as some have lazily suggested, because HBCU graduates do not value their education. The Gallup data shows the opposite — HBCU graduates report deeper attachment to their alma maters than their peers at PWIs. The problem is structural: HBCU graduates earn, on average, less than graduates of wealthier institutions, not because their education was inferior but because the alumni networks, corporate recruitment pipelines, and institutional prestige that drive early-career earnings are less developed. They have less to give because they were given less to start with, and the cycle perpetuates itself with mechanical precision.

But structural explanations, necessary as they are, cannot be the entire story, because there are HBCU graduates who have achieved extraordinary wealth and influence — Oprah Winfrey, who attended Tennessee State; Robert F. Smith, who donated $34 million to his alma mater Morehouse in a single gesture; David Steward, the billionaire founder of World Wide Technology, a graduate of Central Missouri State but a devoted HBCU philanthropist. The question that the HBCU community must ask itself, and that those who love these institutions must answer honestly, is whether the culture of giving back has been nurtured and reinforced with sufficient urgency. Every homecoming celebration, every step show, every tailgate — these are expressions of love for the institution. But love that does not translate into sustained financial commitment is, in the language of institutional survival, insufficient.

The Deferred Maintenance Time Bomb

Walk the campus of almost any HBCU outside the top tier — outside Howard, Spelman, Morehouse, Hampton — and the physical evidence of the crisis is visible in every cracked sidewalk, every leaking roof, every laboratory equipped with instruments from the previous century. The Department of Education estimates that HBCUs collectively face more than $15 billion in deferred maintenance needs. Buildings that should have been renovated decades ago continue to serve students in conditions that would trigger immediate intervention at wealthier institutions. Science laboratories lack the equipment necessary for modern research. Dormitories that were built in the 1950s and 1960s operate with plumbing and electrical systems that have exceeded their useful life by decades.

This is not merely an aesthetic problem. It is a recruitment problem, a retention problem, an accreditation problem, and ultimately an existential problem. When a prospective student visits a well-funded PWI and then visits an underfunded HBCU, the contrast in physical facilities communicates a message about institutional health and investment that no amount of legacy or cultural pride can fully overcome. The student sees what the nation has invested in one institution and what it has failed to invest in the other, and the student makes a rational choice based on visible evidence. To blame the student for that choice is to misunderstand entirely how institutional competition works.

The State Funding Betrayal

Nineteen states operate public HBCUs, and in nearly every one of those states, the funding history is a documented record of systematic inequity. A landmark 2021 report found that public HBCUs in those 19 states had been underfunded by a cumulative total of approximately $12.8 billion compared to their non-HBCU counterparts over the preceding decades. This is not a matter of interpretation. It is a matter of arithmetic: state funding formulas, legislative appropriations, and capital investment decisions consistently allocated fewer dollars per student to HBCUs than to predominantly white institutions within the same state systems.

Maryland provides perhaps the most instructive case. For decades, the state operated a dual system of higher education in which HBCUs were systematically underfunded and had their programs duplicated at neighboring predominantly white institutions — a practice that effectively siphoned students and resources away from HBCUs while maintaining the appearance of equal access. A federal court found in 2013 that Maryland had maintained policies that perpetuated segregation in its higher education system, and it took until 2021 for the state to agree to a $577 million settlement to address decades of inequity. Similar patterns have been documented in Mississippi, Tennessee, Alabama, and virtually every other state with public HBCUs.

What a Serious Revitalization Demands

Here is where the conversation must shift from diagnosis to prescription, because the crisis is real and the window for intervention is narrowing with each passing year. A serious HBCU revitalization plan — not a performative one, not a symbolic one, but a plan that actually matches the scale of the problem — requires action on multiple fronts simultaneously.

First, federal and state endowment matching programs. The FUTURE Act of 2019, which permanently authorized $255 million in annual mandatory funding for minority-serving institutions, was a step in the right direction, but it was a step where a sprint was needed. What HBCUs require is an endowment-building initiative modeled on the challenge grant concept: for every dollar an HBCU raises from alumni and private donors, the federal government matches it, up to a defined ceiling, for a sustained period of at least ten years. This would create a powerful incentive for private giving while addressing the structural endowment gap that no amount of annual appropriations can close.

Second, corporate partnerships that go beyond philanthropy. The most promising development in HBCU funding in recent years has been the growth of genuine corporate partnerships — not the check-writing variety, but the kind that embed corporate research, internship pipelines, and recruitment commitments directly into HBCU campuses. Google’s $50 million commitment to HBCUs, Apple’s HBCU initiative, and similar programs from Netflix, Bank of America, and other major corporations represent a model that must be dramatically expanded. When corporations locate research centers on HBCU campuses, when they guarantee interview slots for HBCU graduates, when they invest in the physical and technological infrastructure that makes cutting-edge research possible, they create a virtuous cycle that benefits the institution, the students, and the company itself.

Third, STEM investment at a transformative scale. HBCUs currently produce a disproportionate share of Black STEM graduates despite having access to a fraction of the laboratory facilities, research funding, and faculty resources available at research universities. Imagine what they could produce with adequate investment. The National Science Foundation’s HBCU-UP program has demonstrated that targeted STEM funding at HBCUs yields extraordinary returns, but the program’s current funding level is a fraction of what the opportunity demands. A serious commitment would mean not hundreds of millions but billions directed toward building world-class STEM facilities at HBCUs, funding faculty research positions, and creating the infrastructure for HBCUs to compete for major federal research grants.

Fourth, alumni engagement as a cultural imperative. The HBCU community must undertake an honest self-examination of its giving culture. The love is there. The pride is there. The homecoming attendance proves it every year. But giving must become as central to HBCU alumni identity as the traditions and memories that bind graduates to their institutions. This means systematic alumni engagement programs, giving circles, class challenges, and the creation of a culture where contributing financially is not an obligation but an honor — where the expectation is as clear and as powerful as the expectation to show up for homecoming.

“If you are always trying to be normal, you will never know how amazing you can be.”
— Maya Angelou, who taught at Wake Forest but championed HBCUs throughout her life

Fifth, consolidation where necessary, without shame. Not every HBCU can be saved in its current form, and pretending otherwise serves sentiment at the expense of students. Some institutions with enrollment below sustainable thresholds should be merged with stronger HBCUs, combining their legacies and alumni bases into institutions with the critical mass to survive and thrive. This is not an act of surrender. It is an act of strategic intelligence — the recognition that two struggling institutions combined into one strong one serves Black students better than two institutions slowly bleeding to death.

The HBCUs were built by people who had nothing — formerly enslaved men and women who pooled pennies, who built schoolhouses with their own hands, who believed with a ferocity that shames our current complacency that education was the path to freedom. They built these institutions not as monuments but as machines — machines for the production of excellence, for the transformation of possibility, for the creation of a Black professional class that would make the case for equality not through protest alone but through undeniable competence. Those machines are breaking down. The question is not whether we notice. The question is whether we love the thing enough to fix it, or whether we will content ourselves with praising its memory while we watch it die. The children who will need these institutions ten years from now, twenty years from now, are already alive. They are waiting. And the silence with which we greet their future is a judgment not on them but on us.