HBCUs: Founded Under Exclusion, $12 Billion Underfunded Today

The first institution that would become an HBCU — the Institute for Colored Youth, later Cheyney University — was founded in Pennsylvania in 1837. Lincoln University (1854) and Wilberforce University (1856) followed before the Civil War. The vast majority of HBCUs were founded in the decades immediately after emancipation, when the combination of Freedmen's Bureau funding, missionary society investment, Black church resources, and the labor of the first generation of legally free Black people created an extraordinary burst of institution-building in the face of violent resistance.

Howard University (1867), Morehouse College (1867), Spelman College (1881), Tuskegee University (1881), and Meharry Medical College (1876) were all founded within 20 years of emancipation, in a period when the people founding them had been legally prohibited from education one generation earlier. The founders of these institutions were operating under conditions of extreme material scarcity, legal vulnerability, and constant physical threat — in an environment where white neighbors frequently opposed the presence of Black educational institutions as a threat to the social order they were maintaining through violence.

The Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1890 — the Second Morrill Act — required states that received federal land-grant funds to either admit Black students to their existing land-grant institutions or establish separate land-grant institutions for Black students. Every former Confederate state chose segregation: they established or designated Black land-grant colleges (which became HBCUs like Alabama A&M, Fort Valley State, Prairie View A&M, and Florida A&M) while ensuring that the funding those institutions received was a fraction of what the white land-grant institutions received.

The "separate but equal" framework that the Supreme Court formally ratified in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) was the legal architecture under which HBCUs existed for 60 years: legally required by the Morrill Act to exist, legally mandated by states to accept all Black students excluded from white institutions, and systematically denied the equivalent funding that made "equal" a fiction. Black land-grant institutions received state funding at rates that were, in some cases, as low as 10–20% of what comparable white institutions received. The word "equal" in "separate but equal" was never implemented as policy anywhere in the United States.

Howard University's Law School, under Charles Hamilton Houston, trained Thurgood Marshall and the generation of lawyers who argued Brown v. Board of Education. Spelman College produced the first generation of Black women with access to liberal arts education at a time when no white institution in the South would have them. Morehouse College's alumni include Martin Luther King Jr. (who enrolled at 15) and a disproportionate share of Black American civic, political, and intellectual leadership across the 20th century. The concentration of Black professional production in HBCUs was not a natural outcome — it was the result of exclusion from every alternative, combined with institutions that refused to treat exclusion as the end of the story.

The Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) — argued by Howard Law graduates — raised an existential question for HBCUs: if desegregation required the integration of white institutions, what was the future of institutions built specifically for Black students? This tension became concrete in the late 1950s and 1960s as white universities began (often reluctantly and under legal compulsion) admitting Black students, drawing away the Black students who might otherwise have attended HBCUs.

The question was ultimately resolved not by the elimination of HBCUs but by their transformation: they continued to serve Black students who chose them, they were opened formally to students of all races, and they maintained their distinctive institutional culture and mission while competing in a newly desegregated landscape for students and funding. Many HBCUs, particularly in the South, also served significantly white student populations for the first time. But the transition was economically difficult: the loss of students who moved to newly accessible white institutions reduced tuition revenue without a compensating increase in state funding that would have reflected HBCUs' expanded public role.

A 2021 investigation by The Associated Press, conducted in partnership with POLITICO, analyzed land-grant funding in 16 states with both historically white land-grant universities and HBCUs. The finding: those states had shortchanged their HBCUs by at least $12.8 billion in land-grant funding since 1987, compared to what their white land-grant institutions received. The gap was not a funding choice — it was a legal violation of the Morrill Land-Grant Act's requirement that states provide "equitable" funding to land-grant institutions regardless of race.

The states with the largest documented gaps included Florida ($1.26 billion gap: University of Florida vs. Florida A&M), Virginia ($1.2 billion: Virginia Tech vs. Virginia State), and Maryland ($577 million: University of Maryland vs. Morgan State and the University of Maryland Eastern Shore). In every case, the white land-grant institution received state funding that the HBCU was legally entitled to share but did not receive. The AP found that most states had not conducted an equity analysis comparing their HBCU and white land-grant funding since at least the 1970s — despite federal law requiring equitable treatment since 1890.

The $12 billion funding gap manifests in the physical and operational details of HBCU campuses. A 2020 General Accountability Office report found that the deferred maintenance backlog at public HBCUs was significantly higher per campus than at comparable white institutions — meaning buildings, infrastructure, and facilities that should have been maintained over years had not been, because funding was not available. Laboratory equipment that determines whether a STEM program can attract competitive students was, in many cases, decades behind what nearby white institutions had. Dormitories were overcrowded. Administrative systems were understaffed.

The endowment gap is equally stark. Harvard University's endowment exceeds $50 billion. Howard University's endowment — the largest of any HBCU — is approximately $800 million. The endowment gap reflects both the historical underfunding that prevented HBCU graduates from accumulating wealth comparable to white institution graduates, and the explicit patterns of philanthropy that direct large gifts to already-endowed institutions. The wealth cycle is self-reinforcing: well-funded institutions produce wealthy graduates who donate back, creating larger endowments that fund better facilities, which attract better-resourced students, which produce wealthier graduates. Underfunded institutions start and stay behind in this cycle.

HBCUs today enroll approximately 10% of Black college students in the United States but produce approximately 25% of Black college graduates — a completion rate that significantly exceeds that of predominantly white institutions serving Black students. Research consistently finds that Black students at HBCUs report higher satisfaction, stronger sense of belonging, better relationships with faculty, and better post-graduation employment outcomes than comparable Black students at predominantly white institutions. The research on HBCU graduation rate advantage is robust and replicated.

The Biden administration's Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (2021) and Inflation Reduction Act (2022) included significant HBCU funding — approximately $5.8 billion in direct grants and capital funding. While significant, this addressed deferred maintenance and some capital needs without resolving the ongoing underfunding structure or the $12.8 billion land-grant gap. The HBCU EQUIP Act and related legislation to equalize land-grant funding remained pending in Congress as of 2025. The institutions that built the Black professional class of the 20th century with a fraction of the resources given to white institutions are still waiting for the 130 years of legal obligation to be fulfilled.