In August 2012, Morris Brown College filed for Chapter 11. In 2013, St. Paul College closed after 125 years. And South Carolina State University may close for at least a year – another devastating blow to the legacy of HBCU’s. Despite the significant role that historically black institutions have played in higher education for African-Americans, there are still obstacles in a long trajectory of policies that have undermined these institutions.
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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The Battle for HBCU’s was originally published on blackamericaweb.com
