Let’s kick things off with the number that gets repeated most often, because it is usually the wrong one. You will see it written that big philanthropy gave HBCUs “$45 million”; that figure gets waved around as the whole story.
It isn’t.
That $45 million is a single year, 2019, and it was down from $65 million in 2002. The number that actually anchors the comparison is bigger and stranger.
From 2015 to 2019, the eight Ivy League schools together received $5.5 billion in foundation grants. The country’s historically Black colleges and universities, all of them, received $303 million. Break that down per school and per year, and the average Ivy pulled in about 178 times what the average HBCU did: roughly $110 million a year against $618,588. Those figures come from “Philanthropy and HBCUs,” a 2023 analysis by Candid and ABFE that the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education revisited in 2026.
We are not economists or philanthropy researchers, and this is one report, careful but singular. What follows is our reading of what it found, not financial or policy advice. The numbers here are broad patterns drawn from foundation data, not a verdict on any one school or donor.
The reflex answer, and why it doesn’t hold
The first explanation most people reach for is size. Ivy League schools are huge, old, and rich, so of course foundations write them huge checks. Prestige attracts money; the gap is really just an endowment gap in a different coat. It’s a tidy story, and the report saw it coming.
The authors didn’t stop at comparing HBCUs to Harvard and Yale, which is not a fair fight and everyone knows it. They also matched HBCUs against similar schools, grouped by size, type, and location. Compared with those peers, not the Ivies, HBCUs still received only about two-thirds as much foundation money.
Strip out prestige and scale, and a gap remains.
That two-thirds figure is the heart of the whole thing. It means the 178x number can’t be explained away with “well, of course, look how big Princeton is.” Compare like with like, and the shortfall persists.
Susan Taylor Batten, who runs ABFE, told Fortune the team expected some disparity going in but not this. “However, we were surprised by the data that indicated the enormity of the disparate funding between Ivy League colleges and HBCUs,” she said.
What foundation money actually follows
If not raw size, then what? The report and the people who built it point to something less flattering than a spreadsheet: existing wealth and existing relationships.
Batten put it plainly to the Nonprofit Quarterly. “Part of it is about relationships,” she said. The people who hand out grants tend to fund the schools and networks they already know, and the schools already inside those networks keep getting found.
That compounds. Marybeth Gasman, who has studied HBCU finances extensively, described the pattern as a loop. “Wealth begets wealth,” she has said. “This is the same thing that happens with HBCUs.” Money builds up where money already is, and the schools without a century of endowment behind them are the ones foundations then judge as riskier or less established.
A common assumption is that HBCU alumni simply give less, and that’s why the wells run dry. The evidence cuts the other way. A Bloomberg analysis found that at some HBCUs, the share of alumni who give matches or beats elite mostly-white schools. The contrast it drew between Spelman and Smith is stark: Spelman raised $2.52 million in 2016 on a $348 million endowment, while Smith, sitting on $1.6 billion, raised $36.3 million. Similar loyalty, wildly different dollar totals. The limit isn’t willingness to give. It’s how much family wealth alumni have to give from, which sits on top of a roughly six-to-one white-Black wealth gap. Foundation dollars, meant to be the counterweight to exactly that kind of imbalance, instead track it.
Batten was careful not to be shocked by the underlying pattern, even while the scale surprised her. “We were not surprised by the findings because philanthropy generally funds Black-led nonprofit organizations disproportionately less than other similarly situated organizations,” she told Fortune. That’s her read of a broader tendency, not a settled law, but it lines up with what the two-thirds figure already showed.
What has and hasn’t shifted
The report covers 2002 through 2019, and the trend inside that window is not one of steady improvement. Foundation giving to HBCUs actually fell over the period, and so did the number of foundations giving, dropping from 158 funders in 2002 to 100 in 2019. Fewer donors, smaller checks.
The money that does arrive is also concentrated. The top 10 best-funded HBCUs received 52 percent of all foundation dollars going to HBCUs between 2015 and 2019, and private HBCUs took in more than double what public ones did. So the $303 million total is itself unevenly split, which means the typical HBCU has it worse than even the per-school average of $618,588 suggests.
If any of this touches something in your own life or work, whether you’re weighing where to give or thinking about a school that shaped you, it’s worth talking through with people who know the finances of these institutions well.
How to read 178 without overclaiming
Perhaps the most useful way to hold this number is to be clear about what it does and doesn’t prove. It does not prove that any single foundation set out to shortchange HBCUs, and the report doesn’t claim that. What it does show is a lasting gap that survives the obvious checks. Match the schools on size and type, and there’s still a gap. Look at alumni loyalty, and these schools are giving as hard as anyone. The gap tracks accumulated wealth and existing relationships more than it tracks need or performance, which is a harder thing to fix than a line item.
The authors close the report with a line that is plainly advocacy rather than neutral finding, so read it as their argument: “HBCUs have a proven record of doing more with less, but accepting less should not be an option,” they write. Whether or not you land where they land, the underlying figures are what make the case, and they’re all in the Candid and ABFE report itself. That’s the document to read before deciding what the 178 means.
