Dr Dietra Trent, Executive Director of the White House Initiative on HBCUs (Photo/BlackPressUSA)
By Karen Stokes
The Biden administration recently announced that it has invested a record $16 billion in historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) over the past three years.
These historic funding levels, the most by any administration demonstrate President Biden and Vice President Harris’s ongoing commitment to HBCUs.
Over the past three years, the money was invested in:
- Nearly $4 billion invested in HBCUs through the American Rescue Plan and other COVID relief legislation.
- $2.6 billion invested from the Department of Education to build institutional capacity at HBCUs.
- Over $1.6 billion invested through Federal grants,cooperative agreements,and “other competitive funding opportunities”
- Almost $950 million to support HBCUs in growing research capacity and related infrastructure
- Nearly $719 million in grant funding to expand STEM academic capacity and educational programs
- Over $150 million in federal contracting opportunities awarded to HBCUs, including for research and expansion of STEM education programs at the Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Transportation, Department of Energy, and the U.S. Agency for International Development
- $1.6 billion in capital finance debt relief for 45 public and private HBCUs
- Over $2.4 million in Project SERV funds to support HBCUs affected by more than a dozen bomb threats in 2022
- $2.8 billion in need-based grants and other federal programs, including Pell Grants, Federal Work-Study and Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants
- Nearly $1.3 billion to support veterans attending HBCUs through the GI bill and other college, graduate school, and training programs “We are working closely with our 37 federal agencies to ensure that they too are creating greater opportunities for HBCUs and removing barriers. The first ever university affiliated research center at Howard University and seven other HBCUs will be doing research for the Department of the Air Force. That is a long term relationship over a five year period,” said Dr Dietra Trent, Executive Director of the White House Initiative on HBCUs.
Howard University (Photo/Howard University
Telehealth)
“What we are trying to do is make sure that we are building out the resurgence and partnerships in a sustainable way,” she said. “The bottom line is that we’re trying to make these sustainable relationships so that whoever is in office, this is not something that we have to start all over again. If we can make sure that our agencies are well versed in the talent within our HBCUs, then it becomes a matter of sustaining those relationships.”
Research suggests that HBCUs provide opportunities for upward mobility compared to other colleges in the country. Nearly a third of students who graduate from HBCUs will move up at least two income quintiles from their parents by the age of 30.
About 40% of all Black engineers, half of all Black teachers and 70% of all Black doctors and dentists earned their degrees from HBCUs, the Biden administration shared in their news release.
According to social mobility research by the United Negro College Fund, HBCUs support almost five times more students than Ivy League schools in helping community members transition from the bottom 40% in U.S. household income to the top 60%.
“I think that going forward we need to invest more in HBCUs and as our President says all the time, “an investment in HBCUs is an investment in the future of our country.” If we are going to continue to outcompete and out innovate other countries then we have to have HBCUs at the table, we have to pull from talent across the country so when you think of what we’re trying to do and what we’ve done we need to continue to invest in the research capacity of our HBCUs. Our challenges in this country are great and we need HBCUs at the table to ensure that we are meeting these challenges,” Dr. Trent said.