get these nets
Veteran
How America Cheated Its Black Colleges
24 February 2022
Compared to their predominantly white counterparts, the nation’s Black land-grant universities have been underfunded by at least $12.8 billion over the last three decades. Many are in dire financial straits
Inside the men’s dormitory at Tennessee State University (TSU), the heating and cooling unit is a rusted relic from the 1960s. Nearby, in the studio art building, yellowed paint is peeling off the cracked plaster walls. “Two thirds of our buildings are in substantial need of repair,” says Glenda Glover, president of this historically Black institution in Nashville.
A contracting firm recently pegged the bill for TSU’s deferred maintenance at $427 million, a nearly unreachable sum for a school with an operating loss of more than $80 million a year on just $116 million in revenue and a puny $63 million endowment. “For years there has been a lack of funding,” Glover says. “There has been neglect.”
Most of America’s 100 historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) are struggling financially. Now comes the shadow of violence. Bomb threats were made against several HBCUs three times in the last four weeks, including six on Monday and at least a dozen on Tuesday, the first day of Black History Month. Investigators have yet to find any explosives or identify suspects, but campus disruptions are one more burden for the schools. Nationwide, roughly half of them are private institutions, with negligible regular funding from the government. But TSU is one of 18 public “land-grant” HBCUs founded in the 19th century by state legislatures in the South as counterparts to then exclusively white schools like the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and North Carolina State in Raleigh.
All land-grant schools, whether Black or white, were created with the same purpose: to foster agricultural research and instruction. Most receive their annual appropriations from state legislatures in a single lump sum. The record of those appropriations and the side-by-side existence of these historically white and historically Black public schools allowed Forbes to make apples-to-apples comparisons of per-student funding levels by the various states.
Between 1987 (the earliest year for which comprehensive data are available) and 2020, the 18 Black schools were underfunded by an aggregate of $12.8 billion, adjusted for inflation (see table). Over those 33 years, TSU received $1.9 billion less than it should have, had it been funded at the same per-student level as the University of Tennessee. The worst off? North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University (NC A&T) in Greensboro, founded in 1891. Since 1987, it has been underfunded by an inflation-adjusted total of $2.8 billion. It’s not uniformly bad news. Schools in two states—Delaware and Ohio—were not underfunded at all.
To some extent, the greater state funding of the predominantly white land-grant schools can be explained by those institutions’ strength as research universities. A handful of states, like North Carolina, reward that strength with extra dollars earmarked for research. In 2020, for example, the North Carolina legislature gave NC State, just 7% of whose 32,000 students are Black, an extra $79 million for research (15% of its total state appropriation, less than 5% of its $1.6 billion operating budget). By contrast, it gave NC A&T, the Black land-grant school—the nation’s largest HBCU, with 11,700 students—just $9.5 million for research, amounting to 10% of its state appropriation. But explaining away funding disparities because of research money is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy: The white institutions’ ability to host research in their gleaming, state-of-the-art laboratories is the result of decades of generous funding by the states, while researchers at counterpart HBCUs have been starved for cash.
The single worst instance of annual underfunding for any school was in 2020, when the North Carolina legislature appropriated A&T $95 million, $8,200 less per student than the $16,400 per student it gave to NC State. (The state legislature is allocating an additional $11 million to A&T in 2022, mostly to support doctoral programs and agricultural research.) Instructional expenses per student at NC State: $15,681, versus $7,631 for the HBCU. Even Student Services, which includes admissions and the registrar’s office, are better funded at the predominantly white school. At NC State it amounts to $1,342 per Wolfpacker versus $726 per Aggie.
24 February 2022
Compared to their predominantly white counterparts, the nation’s Black land-grant universities have been underfunded by at least $12.8 billion over the last three decades. Many are in dire financial straits
Inside the men’s dormitory at Tennessee State University (TSU), the heating and cooling unit is a rusted relic from the 1960s. Nearby, in the studio art building, yellowed paint is peeling off the cracked plaster walls. “Two thirds of our buildings are in substantial need of repair,” says Glenda Glover, president of this historically Black institution in Nashville.
A contracting firm recently pegged the bill for TSU’s deferred maintenance at $427 million, a nearly unreachable sum for a school with an operating loss of more than $80 million a year on just $116 million in revenue and a puny $63 million endowment. “For years there has been a lack of funding,” Glover says. “There has been neglect.”
Most of America’s 100 historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) are struggling financially. Now comes the shadow of violence. Bomb threats were made against several HBCUs three times in the last four weeks, including six on Monday and at least a dozen on Tuesday, the first day of Black History Month. Investigators have yet to find any explosives or identify suspects, but campus disruptions are one more burden for the schools. Nationwide, roughly half of them are private institutions, with negligible regular funding from the government. But TSU is one of 18 public “land-grant” HBCUs founded in the 19th century by state legislatures in the South as counterparts to then exclusively white schools like the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and North Carolina State in Raleigh.
All land-grant schools, whether Black or white, were created with the same purpose: to foster agricultural research and instruction. Most receive their annual appropriations from state legislatures in a single lump sum. The record of those appropriations and the side-by-side existence of these historically white and historically Black public schools allowed Forbes to make apples-to-apples comparisons of per-student funding levels by the various states.
Between 1987 (the earliest year for which comprehensive data are available) and 2020, the 18 Black schools were underfunded by an aggregate of $12.8 billion, adjusted for inflation (see table). Over those 33 years, TSU received $1.9 billion less than it should have, had it been funded at the same per-student level as the University of Tennessee. The worst off? North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University (NC A&T) in Greensboro, founded in 1891. Since 1987, it has been underfunded by an inflation-adjusted total of $2.8 billion. It’s not uniformly bad news. Schools in two states—Delaware and Ohio—were not underfunded at all.
To some extent, the greater state funding of the predominantly white land-grant schools can be explained by those institutions’ strength as research universities. A handful of states, like North Carolina, reward that strength with extra dollars earmarked for research. In 2020, for example, the North Carolina legislature gave NC State, just 7% of whose 32,000 students are Black, an extra $79 million for research (15% of its total state appropriation, less than 5% of its $1.6 billion operating budget). By contrast, it gave NC A&T, the Black land-grant school—the nation’s largest HBCU, with 11,700 students—just $9.5 million for research, amounting to 10% of its state appropriation. But explaining away funding disparities because of research money is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy: The white institutions’ ability to host research in their gleaming, state-of-the-art laboratories is the result of decades of generous funding by the states, while researchers at counterpart HBCUs have been starved for cash.
The single worst instance of annual underfunding for any school was in 2020, when the North Carolina legislature appropriated A&T $95 million, $8,200 less per student than the $16,400 per student it gave to NC State. (The state legislature is allocating an additional $11 million to A&T in 2022, mostly to support doctoral programs and agricultural research.) Instructional expenses per student at NC State: $15,681, versus $7,631 for the HBCU. Even Student Services, which includes admissions and the registrar’s office, are better funded at the predominantly white school. At NC State it amounts to $1,342 per Wolfpacker versus $726 per Aggie.