By Naomi Harris
To be sure, the problem affects more than just HBCUs. Overall, Black student enrollment across higher education has been declining. But it’s particularly evident at historically Black institutions, which are specifically committed to educating Black people.
HBCUs educate most of the nation’s Black engineers, lawyers and judges. Fewer men in these programs means that the diversity of the professions will suffer and that the racial wealth gap will grow.
Calvin Hall, who leads N.C. Central’s mass communications department, wants to find a way to attract more male students into the mostly female program — and he has heard a similar desire from other faculty members.
Men “seem to be falling through the cracks,” he said. Meanwhile, Hall sees women in the communications program winning awards and taking leadership roles in student organizations. Narrowing the gender gap matters — and not just because Black men should be seen as successful “beyond the usual tropes like athletics or music.”
Experts agree about one source of the downturn. By the time they are set to graduate from high school, Black male students often do not feel they are college material. The enrollment decline shows that.
Meredith Anderson, the K-12 research director at the United Negro College Fund, calls it a “belief gap” between what Black male students can achieve and what others, such as teachers or college counselors, think they can.
The data bears this out. Non-Black teachers have lower expectations for Black students than Black teachers have, studies show. Black boys are more than three times as likely as White boys to be suspended from school. Black students also are underrepresented in programs for gifted and talented students and in Advanced Placement courses.
If being in school is not something you feel positive about, “there’s no reason why you would want to continue down a track like that,” he said.
And college sometimes amounts to delayed gratification: The appeal of earning a paycheck without waiting for a degree — or earning a credential and then getting promoted as a result — lures many Black men away, he said.
A few HBCUs are bucking the trend: Male enrollment at Fisk University and Morehouse College increased between 2016 and 2021.
Morehouse College admissions recruiter Jacory Bernard said that when he speaks at college fairs, on in-school visits, on social media or during campus tours, the pitch he makes to Black men interested in Morehouse goes beyond an educational benefit.
“For these young Black boys growing up in our world, it is a challenge just existing. They had these preconceived ideas and notions of their identity in context to the world. It is harder,” Bernard said. “You have the entirety of your life to spend as a minority in America; there is something profound about choosing for four years to be the majority.”
And others are working on specific fixes to improve the pipeline into higher education. In South Carolina, for example, a collaboration between Claflin and Clemson Universities aims to recruit and train more Black male teachers and other men of color to work in the state’s public schools.
Through the program, Jarod Barksdale, a 2020 Claflin graduate, mentored young boys in the Orangeburg, S.C., public schools while he was in college. He now teaches in middle school. It is important to him that young boys have teachers and potential role models who look like them — often a rarity. The vast majority of public school teachers nationwide and in South Carolina are White — and relatively few are men.
If fewer Black men go on to get degrees, young boys will view that undertaking as less important, Barksdale said.
The cost of attending an HBCU also can deter potential students.
Valdez Wilson was the first man in his family to go to college. And, he always knew he wanted to attend an HBCU, he said. He started out at Claflin — but paying out of pocket became too expensive for him.
Claflin’s net price — the cost of attendance after aid is factored in — in 2020-2021 was about $19,300, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. That year, the net price at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, to which Wilson transferred, was just over $11,000. And even though he pays out-of-state tuition, he receives the North Carolina Promise scholarship.
“Claflin wasn’t a bad school. I loved being at an HBCU and all of the connections that I had. The issue was funding,” Wilson said.
And the cost of Claflin isn’t unique among private HBCUs, according to national data. In 2020-21, the net price at private HBCUs for students living on campus was more than $30,000. For on-campus students at public HBCUs, the cost was nearly $23,000.
The cost of HBCUs is a challenge, acknowledged Adriel Hilton, the vice chancellor for student affairs and enrollment management at Southern University in New Orleans. Although HBCUs do provide scholarships, many predominantly White institutions — which have a history of more government funding and larger endowments — can offer more aid.
Although Southern has reported an increase in the number of applications over the past three years, the proportion of male applicants has fallen. (Application numbers for fall 2023 are still coming in.)
“Students are shopping for the best opportunity for them in terms of cost. They’re going to go where it is the cheapest they can attend,” Hilton said.
Southern is doing what it can to increase male enrollment, he said. The university brought back men’s basketball this year after suspending it at the end of the 2020 season as part of broader cost cutting, and the university offers room-and-board scholarships to members of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps.
Despite growing up in New Orleans, Ashton Broden never thought he would wind up at Xavier, where he is a freshman. The university is known for its STEM programs, and the cost did not seem worth it to him as a mass communication major.
That changed last year when he found out he would receive the Walsh Scholarship, a full-ride benefit that Xavier gives each year to one male resident of New Orleans. He said he hopes that by graduating he will show other men in his community that this is attainable.
The gender gap on campus stands out to him. Male enrollment at Xavier declined by 7 percent from 2016 to 2021. Only 24 percent of students in 2021 were men.
“If other men see that I did it, it will make other males want to come to Xavier and help grow the number,” Broden said.
Xavier is “deeply concerned” about the shortage of male students on campus, said Curtis Wright, the vice president for student affairs.
The university has taken several steps to address that issue. In the past four years, it gave 75 Black men scholarships through a partnership with Coca-Cola. Xavier recently hired a Black male engagement coordinator, and, as part of its recruitment efforts, it hosts 50 Black high school students on campus each summer.
Shjan Carter, a junior at Howard, especially notices the gender gap on campus in social scenarios — she has more connections with women. She mostly only sees women hanging out on the manicured main yard. Something is missing, she says.
“The mission of an HBCU can’t be fulfilled,” she said, “if we aren’t making a point to educate all Black people.”