Funding For Black Colleges Remains Higher, But They May Never See Another Year Like 2021

North Carolina A&T, the country’s biggest historically Black college, received about $7 million a year in donations in the early 2010s before a multiyear fundraising campaign raised that to an average of about $15 million annually from 2017 to 2019. Then the world exploded.

Following the police murder of George Floyd and the subsequent demonstrations for racial justice, the 13,000-student university raised $18 million in fiscal year 2020, $93 million the next year and $29 million in fiscal year 2022, which ended June 30. That’s an annual average of $45 million, a tripling of philanthropic giving.

The same dynamic is true for many historically Black colleges and universities, or HCBUs. The trick is keeping the momentum going.

“Our corporate partners and foundations really are continuing to push us harder, saying [they] want to do even more,” Kenneth Sigmon, North Carolina A&T’s vice chancellor for university advancement and president of its endowment. “That was part of our conversation with them — that we don’t want this to be a flash in the pan.”

HBCUs have a long history of being underfunded, so the deluge of the last few years has been like blessed rain to parched fields. About one-third of the nation’s 107 historically Black colleges and universities, or HCBUs, received the largest gifts in their history between July 2020 and December 2021, according to We Are HBCUs, a nonprofit group that maintains a database tracking HBCU gifts. Nineteen of those schools saw donations of $10 million or greater for the first time after July 2020, nearly double the ten schools that had such gifts prior.

High-profile donors included MacKenzie Scott, the billionaire philanthropist and ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who gave at least $500 million to more than 20 HBCUs, including $45 million to North Carolina A&T and $20 million to Xavier University of Louisiana, and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and his wife Patty Quillin, who gave $120 million to Morehouse College, Spelman College and the United Negro College Fund amid “the tragedies that the Black community is currently facing,” Hastings said at the time.

“There’s been a significant rise in giving on many fronts,” Xavier President Reynold Verret told Forbes. His school raised $29.6 million in 2021 and $16.2 million in 2022, up from $4.8 million in 2019. “It’s been a new day, and our challenge is to sustain that because that’s what we need for our future.”

HBCUs have a long history of being underfunded, so the deluge of the past few years has been welcome.

Donations in 2022 haven’t kept up the torrid pace of last year. It may be a long time before HBCUs see another fiscal year like 2021, but it won’t be for lack of trying. North Carolina A&T has added new donor-management software and gotten its chancellor, Harold Martin Sr., more directly involved in forging fundraising relationships with high-net-worth alumni and the senior executives of corporate donors. For Spelman College, based in Atlanta, the school is hosting an in-person alumnae event in New York this month and anticipates similar events around the country.

“We remain committed to continuing the current fundraising momentum,” said Helene Gayle, president of Spelman College. “We will continue to expand our efforts to make sure all constituents, stakeholders and friends understand the impact of a Spelman College education and their important role in making it happen.”

At Spelman, private donations have been strong the past three fiscal years: $68 million in 2020, $81 million in 2021 and $65 million in 2022. But the need for capital is stronger than that, Gayle said. Funding is needed to address infrastructure gaps and housing shortages, and to “provide the kind of financial aid so that finances are not a barrier to women who are able to get accepted into Spelman,” she said.

Spelman has been one of the top HBCUs in terms of fundraising, but its approximately $500 million endowment lags that of its peer non-HBCU schools like Smith College and Holyoke College, which each have over $1 billion. So donations will be key in helping Spelman support students with a high need for scholarships, Gayle said.

“For young people, [it’s about] having a place that they can go to learn, where they can be reinforced for who they are as Black people,” Gayle said. “Where all they need to do is to think about studying, not worrying about some of the challenges that they face … in an environment that still does not affirm who they are as people. And I think that’s what we offer.”

In aggregate, HBCU endowments have swelled, too, especially in fiscal year 2021. Endowments for North Carolina A&T, Morgan State University and Norfolk State University each more than doubled between fiscal 2020 and fiscal 2021, according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers, outpacing the 38% growth of the S&P 500 Index over the same span. The only non-HBCU that doubled its endowment over that period was South Carolina’s Wofford College, thanks to a $150 million gift by Jerry Richardson, the former owner of the Carolina Panthers of the National Football League.

“It’ll be hard to think about matching [2021], because so many of MacKenzie Scott’s gifts skew that and were so extraordinary,” said Tyrone McKinley Freeman, associate professor of philanthropic studies and director of undergraduate programs at the Lilly School of Philanthropy at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis.

Freeman said that while HBCUs experienced unprecedented financial support in fiscal 2021, it hardly makes up for the billions of dollars in funding shortages that have accrued at the schools, partly as a result of government underfunding. He said state funding for HBCUs has lagged that of non-HBCUs, and only in recent years have courts ruled that state legislatures remedy that. Last year, for instance, Maryland agreed to pay $577 million to its four HBCUs after a 2006 federal lawsuit alleged underfunding relative to predominantly white institutions in the state.

“These institutions have been denied resources that others readily received,” Freeman said. “So there’s a deep, deep history of inequities. It’s going to take more than these recent big gifts, as wonderful as they are and as grateful and deserving as the institutions are. This is just the beginning.”