Coalition of HBCUs receives $124 million to support enrollment, graduation and employment

The HBCU Transformation Project, a coalition of 40 historically black colleges and universities, on Wednesday announced a $124 million gift from philanthropic funders Blue Meridian Partners to increase enrollment, graduation and graduate employment.

Michael Lomax, president and CEO of UNCF, which acts as an intermediary to oversee the funding, called the donation a vote of confidence in the coalition, which includes public and private schools.

“This very large grant from them signals to the philanthropic community that this is a really good investment,” he said of Blue Meridian’s gift.

The donation will expand the work of the project, which has already received $75 million from Blue Meridian since 2020. Early results from the project to improve enrollment and other key actions have been strong, said Jim Shelton, Blue Meridian’s president and chief investment and impact officer. Partners.

“It made it relatively easy to say, ‘Obviously, we’re just getting started on this work.’ Institutions have been underinvested and need additional investment, and we believe we can play a catalytic role in bringing resources to the table,” Shelton said, adding that they are actively seeking additional support from other funders to expand to more schools.

The project also received $17.6 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, $4.5 million from JP Morgan Chase and $1 million from Capital One, according to UNCF.

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Blue Meridian first committed funds to support HBCUs at the start of the pandemic to help cover their operating costs when schools had to close.

“One of the things we were worried about was whether HBCUs would survive, because we knew that HBCUs don’t have a lot of endowment, don’t have resources that can support them,” said Harry Williams, president and CEO of the College Foundation Thurgood Marshall (TMCF).

Along with UNCF, TMCF and the Partnership for Education Advancement jointly oversee the project grant, although most of the funds will go directly to participating schools. Three intermediaries also received direct funding from Blue Meridian to increase their ability to support schools.

South Carolina State University used part of its first round of funding to purchase a customer relationship management platform to integrate its enrollment and financial aid applications, which school president Alexander Conyers said were previously “very manual.”

“We had computer systems, but the different systems weren’t talking to each other,” he said.

The new platform allowed the school to text and email applicants, and to identify and contact people who applied but did not complete them. As a result, the number of first-year students increased from 371 in 2019 to 1,200 this year.

“That flexible funding really allowed us to move five to seven years faster than we were going,” said Conyers, who also used project funding to partially revamp the school’s website to make it higher in search results.

By sharing some of these new services and providers, schools are helping keep costs down, Lomax said.

Decades of underfunding and systemic bias in state funding of public HBCUs have made it difficult for schools to build and maintain their basic infrastructure, said Marybeth Gasman, professor emeritus at Rutgers University.

“This is long overdue,” Gusman said of the project and the new funding. “Sharing services is a great idea for institutions that have the financial resources — frankly, most colleges and universities benefit from sharing services.”

The HBCU Transformation Project must meet goals to increase enrollment and graduation rates, as well as graduate employment rates, in order to continue receiving funds. Shelton said Blue Meridian would prefer schools set ambitious goals and miss them, rather than force them to think too small.

The gift combines flexibility and accountability, he said, with the three intermediaries and participating schools having broad discretion in how to use the funds, as long as they present a business case that explains what the funding will accomplish.

Under legislation enacted after the pandemic, HBCUs received nearly $6 billion in funding and support from federal agencies, including the cancellation of $1.6 billion in debt held by the Department of Education, according to the White House.

HBCUs have received significantly less support from philanthropic foundations than predominantly white schools. A recent donation study by the philanthropic research group Candid and ABFE, a nonprofit that advocates for investment in black communities, found that eight Ivy League schools received $5.5 billion from the 1,000 largest U.S. foundations, compared to $45 million for 99 HBCUs in 2019. Between 2002 and 2019, core support for HBCUs declined by 30%, even without adjusting for inflation.

Private support for HBCUs has increased since 2020 in response to the pandemic and the killing of George Floyd, with corporations particularly eager to both fund and partner with schools for workforce development.

Williams hopes more people realize that HBCUs “were the shining star.”

“It was a positive light in the African-American community that transformed and created the middle class as we know it today,” he said.