The one hundred and one Historically Black Colleges and Universities in the United States — a designation that applies to institutions founded before 1964 with the primary mission of educating Black Americans — are, collectively, experiencing the most substantial period of renewed investment and enrollment in their modern history. Total HBCU enrollment in fall 2024 exceeded 330,000 for the first time since the 1970s. First-year applications at the flagship HBCUs (Howard, Spelman, Morehouse, Hampton, North Carolina A&T, Florida A&M, Tuskegee) have in some cases more than doubled since 2019.
The renewed interest has several interlocking sources. The 2020 uprisings concentrated public attention on HBCUs as institutions that had produced a disproportionate share of Black professional, political, and cultural leadership (including, among others, Thurgood Marshall, Kamala Harris, Stacey Abrams, Toni Morrison, and Chadwick Boseman). Billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott made unrestricted gifts totaling more than $560 million to twenty-four HBCUs between 2020 and 2022 — by a wide margin the largest philanthropic investment in HBCUs' history. The Biden administration directed $5.8 billion in federal funding to HBCUs between 2021 and 2024, the largest federal HBCU allocation ever.
The results are visible in the physical plant. Howard University, Hampton University, Spelman College, and Morehouse College have all announced major capital campaigns in the past three years; campus construction at HBCUs is at the highest level since the 1960s. HBCU athletic programs, after decades of erosion to predominantly white institutions, are again competitive at the Division I level — Deion Sanders's tenure at Jackson State from 2020 to 2022 is widely credited with triggering the resurgence.
The work that remains is substantial. HBCUs' combined endowment (approximately $4 billion) is still less than one-tenth of Harvard's ($50 billion) alone, and the federal land-grant funding shortfall documented in a 2023 Department of Agriculture report — which found that the nineteen HBCU land-grant institutions had been underfunded by approximately $13 billion over the past thirty years — has not yet been made up. But the trajectory has, for the first time in fifty years, unambiguously turned.
