Wednesday, September 11, 2024
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HBCUs level up: Funding pours in to tackle critical needs and rewrite history after George Floyd

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Since 2020, the year that saw both the murder of George Floyd and the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Spelman College has received an influx of philanthropic and federal money that has allowed it to take what one leader called transformational moves.

The Atlanta-based historically Black college used over half of its $22 million in federal pandemic relief to provide student aid and implement measures needed to safely transition students back to in-person learning, according to Jessie Brooks, the college’s vice president of institutional advancement. 

Spelman also increased its endowment and bolstered faculty development and recruitment, among other actions, thanks to a $20 million donation from billionaire philanthropist MacKenzie Scott in 2021, Brooks said in an email. And the institution will provide 200 full scholarships for incoming students over the next 10 years through a $40 million donation from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings and his wife, producer Patty Quillin.

The Hastings-Quillin donation was “transformational since this will allow the institution to use other scholarship funding to support other deserving students,” Brooks said. 

Spelman is but one example of the unprecedented largess that has gone to historically Black colleges and universities in the years following the start of the pandemic and the protests against police brutality and racism in the wake of Floyd’s murder. Along with other colleges and universities, HBCUs have also received historic amounts of federal, and in some cases, state support to mitigate the effects of the COVID pandemic. 

That increased funding over the past three years has been “significant” for HBCUs, said Raymond Pierce, president and CEO of the Southern Education Foundation. The concern, however, is that the funding “will wane again,” he said.

To some, these influxes harken back to the post-Civil War origins of HBCUs when large organizations like the Carnegie Corp. and John D. Rockefeller’s General Education Board placed a focus on educating newly freed African Americans, according to Pierce. 

To see large donors be “reminded of that injustice, and that reminder came about from George Floyd, I thought was quite interesting,” he said.

New sources of funding

The month after George Floyd’s murder, Hastings and Quillin donated $40 million to Spelman and to Morehouse College, also in Atlanta. Scott, meanwhile, has made the largest contribution to HBCUs: $560 million in one-time gifts to nearly two dozen of the institutions, including $50 million to Prairie View A&M University, in Texas. 

And last year, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation committed $100 million over five years to the United Negro College Fund and five other higher ed consortiums and organizations acting as intermediaries to a number of minority serving institutions, including HBCUs. 


“After decades of struggles, someone came along and told you that they were going to finish paying off your mortgage. Imagine the kind of financial relief that that would create for you and those who would accredit you and judge you based on your fiscal solvency.”

Lodriguez Murray

Senior Vice President of Public Policy and Government Affairs at UNCF


Major corporations and businesses have also made large investments in HBCUs in recent years, said Terrell Strayhorn, director of the Center for the Study of HBCUs at Virginia Union University. 

In 2020, Virginia Union, for example, received $6 million from Dominion Energy for STEM programs and $1 million from TikTok for healthcare scholarships. And in 2022, the university received $1 million from Bank of America to prepare graduates for financial careers.

The renewed conversation around racial equity also influenced historic investments in federal funding for HBCUs. That included more than $5 billion through pandemic relief laws — the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security, or CARES, Act and the American Rescue Plan — and $1.6 billion in debt relief to 45 institutions through the U.S. Department of Education’s HBCU Capital Financing Program. 

For institutions, the debt relief was significant, said Lodriguez Murray, senior vice president of public policy and government affairs at UNCF. HBCUs, like Black people themselves, have a hard time accessing capital, and when they do, it’s often at worse rates than what’s offered to majority-White institutions, he said. 

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