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. It is the silence of people who have grown so used to collapse that they no longer find it remarkable.

And so it is with America’s HBCUs — Historically Black Colleges and Universities, the schools founded specifically to educate Black students when every other door in the republic was bolted shut. There are 107 remaining. They are disappearing at a rate of roughly one per year. 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 (GAO, Historically Black Colleges and Universities: Information on Accreditation, Financial Condition, and Graduation Rates, 2018).

The question is not whether HBCUs are in crisis. The question is why so few people with the power to act 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 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 (UNCF, Frederick D. Patterson Research Institute, 2017). 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 — losing the highest-performing students to predominantly white institutions that recruit them aggressively
• Without endowments, they cannot invest in facilities, laboratories, or the physical infrastructure that accreditation agencies require
• Without endowments, they cannot weather enrollment downturns, economic recessions, or the 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 approximately $34,000 per student at non-HBCU institutions (GAO-18-64, 2018). 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 discussing the crisis, we must discuss the legacy, because HBCUs have contributed so much to this nation that the scale defies casual comprehension.

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 — produced (Thurgood Marshall College Fund, HBCU Impact Report, 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 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 (UNCF, 2017). 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.

This is the kind of analysis that standard testing misses entirely. The Real World IQ assessment — the first IQ test verified for zero demographic bias via IBM Quantum computing — was built by this article’s author to measure six brain regions independently rather than producing a single number that conflates cultural exposure with cognitive ability. Try 10 free questions.

The Perfect Storm

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

The demographic challenge. Total HBCU enrollment dropped from roughly 326,000 in 2010 to roughly 292,000 in 2020 — more than 10% in a single decade (NCES, Digest of Education Statistics, 2021). Some individual schools fell much further. This is not because Black students are choosing not to attend college. It is because they are increasingly choosing predominantly white institutions. Those schools can offer better financial aid packages, more modern facilities, and the perceived prestige advantage that the American marketplace 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, HBCUs were the only option for most Black students seeking a degree. After integration, they became one option among many. And they entered that competition carrying centuries of disadvantage in resources, facilities, and endowment 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 says a school meets quality standards. Without it, students cannot get federal financial aid. Between 2010 and 2023, more than a dozen HBCUs were placed on warning, probation, or lost accreditation entirely (GAO-18-64, 2018). The accrediting agencies judge schools against standards designed for well-resourced universities — financial reserves, student-to-faculty ratios, facility conditions, graduation rates. HBCUs, carrying the weight of chronic underfunding, often struggle to meet them. The GAO found that HBCUs were disproportionately likely to be sanctioned, even when accounting for 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 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+: Deferred maintenance 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 — that produced its judges, its doctors, its engineers, its Congress members, its Nobel laureates — are being allowed to die while the nation celebrates their legacy in the past tense.

Celebration without investment is 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.