*A recent report by the American Institute for Boys and Men reveals that Black male enrollment at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) has reached its lowest level since 1976.
Currently, Black men represent only 26% of HBCU students, a decrease from 38% in 1976. Insider Higher Ed writes, “Out of the 101 HBCUs included in the report, only 20 had student bodies that were at least 40 percent Black men, excluding single-sex institutions like Morehouse and Spelman Colleges. All but one of the HBCUs with higher shares of Black men were small private colleges that typically enroll fewer than 1,000 students.”
“If you’re at an HBCU as a student, and you’re looking around and you know that you’re as likely to see a non-Black student as a Black man, that’s a very big change in the culture and the mission of HBCUs,” said Richard Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men.
Juana Summers from All Things Considered spoke with Calvin Hadley, Howard University’s assistant provost, to discuss the reasons behind this decline. Below are excerpts via NPR.
Juana Summers: I want to start by talking about Howard, one of the foremost HBCUs in this country — a long, long list that I cannot recite of incredible alumni, including Vice President Kamala Harris. Let’s start there. Are you seeing this decline among Black male students where you are?
Calvin Hadley: I am. I’m a Howard alum, and so I remember as a student, the numbers were also pretty stark at that time. I think we were around 33-34% when I was a student, between 2004 and 2008. Now, as you announced in your introduction, Howard University is around 25% male in total. And I think a recent statistic said around 19% of Black males. And so that is felt on campus, that is felt, I think, in our social clubs, it’s felt on the yard. And I think many of our male students have commented that in some of their classes, they’re the only male in their class.
Summers: What do we lose when those Black men are not as robust a presence on campuses like yours?
Hadley: By the time students actually come to college, we’re dealing with the males that have actually transcended what we call the “belief gap” — this gap in between what students can actually achieve and what their professors, teachers, and counselors believe they can achieve. For Black males, that gap is the largest. When they get into the campus, the campus experiences are significantly impacted by the imbalance, right?
At every educational institution, we want a diversity of experience. And so when you don’t have as many males in the classroom, that diversity of experience is significantly impacted. It gets even more scary when we trace it forward, right? I think we’re dealing with some really unique statistics right now. Black males are graduating at a much lower rate than Black females.
Summers: The study that we’ve been talking about, notes that since 2010, as you point out, Black male enrollment has gone down across all colleges. It also points out that HBCU enrollment has also decreased on the whole, but the decline of Black male enrollment at HBCUs outpaces those trends, if only slightly. Can you just explain to me how you understand that gap?
Hadley: So I want to take a small step back. In 2013-14 we had 2990 male applicants for Howard University specifically. In 2022-23 we had 9705. A significant, significant increase.
Summers: And what does that say to you?
Hadley: That the Howard University education, and the HBCU education, is highly sought after, right? And there are a number of really important things that happened between 2012 and 2022 — one of those was the election of President Donald Trump, another was the murder of George Floyd. I think when those things happened in the United States of America, the HBCU experience, which had already been known to many of us, had now become a much more attractive proposition. You notice a significant increase in those male applications.
What I didn’t provide you was the number of female applications that accompany that. While we received 9700 male applications in 2022-23, we received upwards of 30,000 female applications. And I want to take a step aside and say Black women are ripping it up. All the statistics show, from high school to college to college graduation, that the Black women is successful today, and the trajectory is going straight up. Unfortunately, when you look at the Black male, the exact opposite is the case. And so for those Black males that are now being left out of the college equation, that also means they’re being left out and stratified out of a certain portion of our society.
What we now will have is an imbalance in the community that has a significant impact on our ability to create whole families, I think. On the ability for us to ensure that our generations after us have additional success, and really to have additional mobility.
Read the full article here.
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