The Battle for HBCU’s

Historically Black colleges and universities are suffering in today’s environment as parents and students are electing to go elsewhere. The days of almost certainly attending a Black institution as our parents did are a thing of the past. College students today have more choices. Earlier in the month, President Barack Obama was critical of HBCUs during a meeting with members of the Congressional Black Caucus – his first with the group since June 2013.

To find out how to support HBCU’s, as the Tom Joyner Foundation has done since its inception in 1998, raising over $65 million dollars to support 29,000 students at HBCU’s, click HERE. 

While most expected to hear something very different from the president, it was made clear that the focus of HBCUs needs to be on the schools changing their ways of doing business rather than on changes in federal policy. Obama also spoke about his free community college plan – which some HBCU advocates believe will hurt the schools.

The Chair of President Obama’s Board of Advisors on HBCUs, Hampton University President Dr. William Harvey, was critical of the lack of input the Board had on the community college proposal during a speech in Washington to Administration officials in early February.  He said he was “disappointed and saddened” by the lack of agency funding for Historically Black colleges and universities.

“We are not consulted when it comes to policy changes and decisions impacting – in a major way – the institutions on whose behalf we are to advocate.  It happened with Pell. It happened with Parent Plus. And, now it is happening with the new community college initiative,” Harvey said.

I would argue that as times have changed, HBCUs and the way that they do business have not changed with them. You would think as enrollment has grown throughout the years, so would the finances of the institutions that have produced some of the greatest minds in American history. Even today, most of the children who attend these institutions are first and second generation graduates, representing a lifetime of hope to their families. HBCU’s still play a significant role in our culture. The issue is…how to keep them open.

HBCUs have had a tough time during the Obama Administration. In 2011, a change by the Department of Education to Parent PLUS loan standards would eventually cost HBCUs over $150 million. A recent report by the Association of Public And Land Grant Universities says that over $57 million in federal funding for HBCU’s has been withheld in 10 states between 2010 and 2012, because those states did not allocated the proper funding which they can do without penalty.

In fact, many HBCUs are still reeling from the Department of Education’s changes to the lending requirements for its only parent-issued loan program. The tightened credit standards have led to significant, disproportionate declines in enrollment. An estimated 28,000 students were denied loans in 2012, resulting in a collective loss of about $155 million in tuition revenue, a 35-percent reduction, according to the United Negro College Fund.

This is what we have come to in the year 2015. Once vibrant institutions are now teetering on extinction, irrelevance or both. Which leaves one to wonder…what happened? The short answer is funding, policies and politics.  The top ten historically white colleges and universities have a combined endowment of $142 billion, whereas the top ten HBCU’s have a combined endowment of $1.4 billion. In 2012, the endowments of the aforementioned institutions increased by $100 million while HBCUs lost $100 million.  The challenges of educating a nation of young African-Americans remains an significant issue as our society requires one to have more and more advanced education. The days of graduating from high school or college, earning a middle class wage and comfortably taking care of a family as my parents and grandparents did are long gone.

In the face of these changing times, we have a responsibility to keep these institutions alive and relevant. According to The Network Journal, HBCUs are still responsible for 22 percent of current bachelor’s degrees granted to African-Americans. Here are the numbers: 40 percent of all congressmen, 12.5 percent of CEOs, 40 percent of engineers, 50 percent of professors at non-HBCUs, 50 percent of lawyers and 80 percent of judges are HBCU graduates. And before 1990, more than 75 percent of the nation’s Black doctors had been educated at an HBCU.

For me personally as a proud HBCU graduate, Howard University was a place where I gained confidence, life-long friendships and an education that rivals that of an Ivy League or any of the other great institutions of higher learning throughout this country. It was a place where I was told ‘You are the best and the brightest’ and encouraged and pushed to become so.

It was an unbelievable experience. But for some reason, we believed that HBCU’s founded on the promise of educating the sons and daughters of slavery, would always have a viable place in America. We foolishly believed that our government would never let our institutions fail.

Zack Burgess is an award winning journalist, who is the Director/Owner of OFF WOODWARD MEDIA, LLC, where he works as a Writer, Editor and Communications Specialist. His work can be seen at zackburgess.com. Twitter: @zackburgess1

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