Why students are choosing HBCUs: '4 years being seen as family'

SeKai Parker looked on last spring as her prep school classmates tearfully embraced and belted out in unison every word of a Kelly Clarkson song.

It was the senior farewell at Holton-Arms in Bethesda, Maryland, and many of the teens were making college plans that would have them trading one elite, mostly white setting for another. Parker intended to accept an offer from Yale University. But as she scanned her school auditorium, a familiar sinking feeling washed over her.

"I was sitting there by myself, I didn't know a single word, and I had no one to hold onto," she recalled.

After school, she rushed out to meet her mother and made a life-changing declaration: I'm going to Spelman College.

Choosing the historically Black women's college in Atlanta was surprising for a student who had been determined to reach the Ivy League. Yale was one of 16 institutions, including three Ivies, competing for her to enroll.

But her decision reflects a renaissance in recent years among the nation's historically Black colleges and universities, where their nurturing mission, increased funding and growing visibility have been drawing a new wave of students.

Once the primary means for Black Americans to get a college education, the schools now account for 9% of such students. But HBCUs are increasingly becoming the first choice for some of the nation's most sought-after talent, according to interviews with students, guidance counselors, admissions advisers and college officials across the country.

In the past few years, the nation's HBCUs have experienced a boom. From 2018 to 2021, for example, applications for a cross section of Black schools increased nearly 30%, according to the Common App, a platform for students to submit one application to multiple colleges, outpacing the increases of many other schools. Submissions using the Common Black College Application, solely for HBCUs, are projected to reach 40,000 this year, quadruple the total in 2016. And enrollment has soared at some of the schools, even as it declined nationally.

There is also a growing recognition among policymakers and predominantly white schools of the value of HBCUs and the fact that they have long operated at a disadvantage. Federal lawmakers have increased funding for the 101 schools, providing nearly $2 billion since 2017, as well as $2.7 billion this year in pandemic emergency relief. Alumni and philanthropists have donated more than $1 billion in recent years.

When it came time for her son to apply to colleges, Dr. Makunda Abdul-Mbacke thought it was settled: She had gone to Yale as an undergraduate and medical student and earned a master's in public health from Harvard. Her son, Khadim Mbacke, was on the radar of Ivy League and other highly selective schools.

"When we talked about what schools we were interested in, he said he wanted to look at Morehouse College and Howard University, and I was like, 'What?'" she recalled.

She had imagined him eating in the same dining halls and studying in the same classrooms she had. But she realized how different his experience as a Black male today would be from hers as a young woman in the 1970s.

Then in 2019, a tour guide at the University of Pittsburgh pointed out a blue light emergency alarm system for students to summon security. The beacon was supposed to symbolize safety. For Mbacke, though, it conjured thoughts of a different outcome should his towering presence on campus ever be seen as a threat. "He's 6-foot-3," his mother said. "That's the description of every Black man they put on the news."

But after seeing Morehouse in Atlanta, he was beaming, she recalled.

"His coming-of-age has been Mike Brown and Trayvon Martin and all the litany of young Black men that looked like him that have been killed too soon and taken away from their mothers and their families," Makunda Abdul-Mbacke said. "There's no golden key, no golden ticket when you're Black in America," she added. "You're going to have to work hard, and if you can have a fair chance, then you go for it. And he found that space."

The Missouri Effect

America's first Black college, called the African Institute, was opened in Philadelphia in 1837 by a Quaker philanthropist. Later renamed Cheyney University, it had a mission to train teachers and prepare workers for trades.

Still, over the past half-century, many Black students were drawn to predominantly white colleges and universities, which offered financial incentives and better resources.

That led to eroding enrollment at HBCUs — 279,000 students as of 2020, the most recent data available — and a perception, even in the Black community, that they were a second-rate option.

That attitude shift began in part because of the "Missouri Effect," a term coined in 2016 by Walter Kimbrough, president of Dillard, a private, historically Black liberal arts university in Louisiana. In 2015, students at the University of Missouri led demonstrations over a series of racist incidents on campus, ultimately forcing the university system's president and the chancellor of the Columbia campus to resign.

Kimbrough said HBCUs reasserted themselves as the "original safe spaces" for Black students, cultivating their intellects and their spirits. In 2016, the year after the Missouri protests and with Donald Trump campaigning for the White House, some schools saw record increases in freshman enrollment, from 22% at Dillard to 49% at Shaw University in North Carolina.

Spencer Jones, 21, a rising Dillard senior with his sights set on law school, recalled the support he had received. During the protests after George Floyd's murder in 2020, he said, a professor emailed students over the summer to check on their well-being, and last year class discussions centered on the pandemic's disproportionate toll on African Americans. "It gave us a deeper sense of what it means to be Black, going to an HBCU at this time, that we really couldn't have gotten anywhere else," he said.

But then some Generation X parents began redefining what "the best" meant.

Gabrielle Armstrong, 18, a student in Durham, North Carolina, whose grandparents were HBCU graduates and whose parents went to Yale, had long dreamed of attending Duke University in her hometown. But ultimately, she decided on Elizabeth City State University, a small historically Black university in North Carolina.

"I figured I have the rest of my life to be treated like a minority, to fight to be seen as human," she said. "I might as well spend four years being seen as family."

$2 Billion vs. $200 Billion

Unlike their mostly white counterparts, HBCUs still carry the burdens of the country's original sin. They overwhelmingly serve students from low-income households and those who have borne the brunt of an inequitable K-12 system. The schools have long been underfunded compared with predominantly white colleges, and most do not have a pipeline of rich donors.

Many smaller HBCUs have struggled or buckled in recent years under financial strains, enrollment pressures or, in extreme cases, losing accreditation that ensured federal funding and credibility.

Even Howard, the prestigious Washington school long known as "the Black Harvard," has faced challenges. Last fall, Howard students protested housing shortages and poor living conditions in the dorms. After a standoff of more than a month, students reached an agreement with the school and ended the protest.

At the same time, Howard has seen the renewed favor for HBCUs. Undergraduate enrollment climbed 26% between 2019 and 2021.

Professors, alumni and admirers of the school call it "The Mecca," harnessing the power of its history, its community and the talent within it.

Writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, an alumnus who extolled The Mecca in his book "Between the World and Me," and Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer-winning New York Times journalist who conceived of "The 1619 Project," inspired pride on campus when they chose to join the faculty last year over other teaching opportunities.

'A Challenge to the System'

The 911 call came in January, describing bombs placed in Spelman's hallways — one of dozens of such threats against HBCUs over two months. "I had picked this school, this university, because of this reason," the caller said. "There are too many Black students in it."

Parker was halfway through her freshman year when that threat was phoned in, captured in a recording later made public. "It was really hard to hear, but it's the reality," she said. It was also a jarring reminder of why HBCUs came to exist in the first place. "Here, my everyday existence is a challenge to the system," Parker added.

Parker, although she is still haunted by the bomb threat, sees reminders throughout campus that she belongs: in Fish Fry Fridays, where food that kids she grew up with would have scorned as "unhealthy and gross," she said, here represents "fellowship among Black people"; in the wellness center pool, where the chemicals are adjusted to be gentle on Black hair; in classes led by Black male teachers, after not encountering a single one in all her schooling before.