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

A specific silence falls when an old institution dies. It is not the silence of shock or grief, but the silence of people who have grown so used to collapse that they no longer find it remarkable.

This is the story of America’s HBCUs — Historically Black Colleges and Universities, founded to educate Black students when every other door was bolted shut. Of the 107 that remain, more than a dozen have closed or merged since 2000, and the nation has offered little beyond ceremonial praise.

The casualties since 2000 are real — Knoxville College, Barber-Scotia College, and others gone for good — with a dozen more on the edge of losing accreditation as enrollment falls and finances buckle (GAO, 2018).

The question is not whether HBCUs are in crisis. It is why so few people with power seem to care.

The Endowment Gap — The Wound That Bleeds Everything Else

Let us begin with a number that should shame every institution of higher learning, every corporation that talks about diversity, every foundation that claims to care about racial equity.

All 107 HBCUs in the United States combined hold a total endowment of about $3.9 billion (UNCF, Frederick D. Patterson Research Institute, 2017). Harvard University alone holds more than $50 billion, Yale $41 billion, Princeton $35 billion.

The entire HBCU system, educating nearly 300,000 students, holds less wealth than the interest any one of those schools earns in a single quarter. That 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 — losing top students to predominantly white institutions that recruit them aggressively.
• Without endowments, they cannot invest in facilities or labs, or meet the physical standards accreditation agencies require.
• Without endowments, they cannot weather enrollment downturns or recessions. Wealthy institutions absorb these shocks without breaking stride.

The GAO reported in 2018 that HBCUs held a median endowment of about $15,000 per student against roughly $34,000 per student at non-HBCU institutions (GAO, HBCUs — Accreditation, Financial Condition, and Graduation Rates, 2018). And even that comparison flatters HBCUs, since it washes out the enormous wealth concentrated at the top non-HBCU schools.

The Institutions That Built Black America

Before the crisis, the legacy. What HBCUs have contributed to this nation is so large it defies casual comprehension.

These institutions were founded after emancipation, built by formerly enslaved people with their own hands, in communities where it had recently been illegal to read. They produced (Thurgood Marshall College Fund, 2019):

• 80% of Black judges
• 50% of Black lawyers
• 50% of Black doctors
• 40% of Black engineers
• 40% of Black members of Congress

Spelman and Bennett produced generations of Black women leaders that the Seven Sisters would not admit. Morehouse produced Martin Luther King Jr. and Spike Lee; Howard produced Thurgood Marshall and Toni Morrison. Tuskegee trained the fighter pilots who escorted bombers over Nazi Germany while being denied basic civil rights at home.

“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 are only 3% of the nation’s colleges, yet they produce 17% of all Black bachelor’s degrees and 24% of Black STEM degrees (UNCF, 2017). A 2019 Gallup-UNCF study found that Black HBCU graduates reported higher well-being, purpose, and belonging than Black graduates of predominantly white institutions — more likely to feel a professor cared about them, more likely to have had a mentor, more likely to have been engaged in their education.

None of that is sentiment. These are measurable outcomes, and they translate directly into career success and community contribution.

The Perfect Storm

The forces threatening HBCUs are multiple, interlocking, and in some cases contradictory.

The demographic challenge. Total HBCU enrollment fell from about 326,000 in 2010 to about 292,000 in 2020 — more than 10% in a single decade, with some individual schools falling much further (NCES, 2021). This is not because Black students are skipping college. It is because more of them are choosing predominantly white institutions that can offer better financial aid, more modern facilities, and the prestige advantage that comes with institutional wealth.

The irony is bitter and precise: the civil rights victories HBCUs helped win now threaten them. Desegregating higher education opened predominantly white institutions to Black students and, in doing so, created the very competition that now threatens HBCUs with extinction. Before Brown v. Board of Education, HBCUs were the only option for most Black students; after integration they became one option among many — and they entered that contest carrying centuries of disadvantage in resources and wealth.

They were asked to run a marathon against competitors given a fifty-mile head start. Then they were criticized for falling behind.

The accreditation crisis. Accreditation is the official stamp that a school meets quality standards, and without it students cannot receive federal financial aid. Between 2010 and 2017, more than a dozen HBCUs were placed on warning or probation, and some lost accreditation entirely (GAO-18-64, 2018). The agencies judge schools against benchmarks for financial reserves and facility conditions designed around well-resourced universities — benchmarks that HBCUs, hobbled by chronic underfunding, often struggle to meet. The GAO found HBCUs were far more likely to be sanctioned even after accounting for size and mission.

Losing accreditation is a death sentence. Without it there is no federal financial aid, and without federal aid the low-income students most HBCUs serve simply cannot enroll.

Top 5 Solutions That Are Already Working

1. UNCF Scholarship and HBCU Support Program (United States). UNCF awards more than 11,000 scholarships a year and funds HBCU operations and research. Its recipients post a 70% six-year graduation rate — 1.5 times the 40% rate for African American college students overall — and the organization has raised over $500 million since its founding. The data is plain: investing in HBCU students works (UNCF Fact Sheet, 2023).

2. Thurgood Marshall College Fund (United States). TMCF serves 54 public HBCUs nationwide with scholarships and institutional grants, and its scholars graduate at an 85-90% rate against an overall HBCU rate of 39%. Since 1987 the Fund has raised more than $300 million and served 300,000 students, while applications to public HBCUs have surged 126% since 2004 (Rolling Out, November 2023).

3. MacKenzie Scott’s Direct HBCU Giving (United States). Between 2020 and 2022, MacKenzie Scott gave more than $560 million directly to HBCUs — the largest single philanthropic investment in HBCU history — including $20 million each to Dillard and Xavier. Because the gifts were unrestricted, schools could pour them into infrastructure and student aid with no strings attached.

4. HBCU Capital Financing Program (U.S. Department of Education). This federal program gives HBCUs access to low-interest loans for improvements, financing more than $3 billion in construction and renovation. It chips away at the $15 billion delayed-repair crisis by making capital available at rates HBCUs could never secure on the open market (U.S. DOE, 2020).

5. Gallup-UNCF Well-Being Study (United States). The 2019 Gallup-UNCF study documented an HBCU experience that produces measurably better outcomes in well-being and purpose: Black HBCU graduates were more likely to feel a professor cared about them, more likely to have had a mentor, and more likely to have been engaged in their education. These are not sentimental observations but measurable outcomes that lead to career success.

The Bottom Line

The numbers tell a story that no ceremonial praise can override.

• $3.9B vs. $50B — All 107 HBCUs combined versus Harvard alone (UNCF, 2017)
• $12.8B — Cumulative state funding shortfall for public HBCUs in 19 states (UNCF, 2021)
• $15B+ — Delayed repair needs across the HBCU system (U.S. DOE, 2020)
• 326,000 → 292,000 — HBCU enrollment decline in a single decade (NCES, 2021)
• 3% → 17% / 24% / 80% — Share of colleges vs. share of Black bachelor’s degrees, STEM degrees, and judges produced (UNCF; Thurgood Marshall College Fund)

HBCUs were not weakened by irrelevance. They were weakened by a century of financial strangulation disguised as equal treatment. The institutions that built Black America are being allowed to die while the nation celebrates their legacy in the past tense.

Celebration without investment is a eulogy, and every year we deliver eulogies instead of endowments is another year these institutions edge closer to a silence from which there is no return.