A report from New America issued last month presents a lot of the same information we’ve heard for years about how to define a failing college or university. Typically, the signs of flickering life are found in schools with enrollment below 1,000 students and hemorrhaging cash reserves to pay off debts and operational costs, low numbers in graduation rates, and environmental factors like population loss, non-public revenue streams, and freefalling market share.
HBCUs have operated and survived with these data points for generations, but this report’s timing and the new realities dawning for higher education may present a serious problem for public and private black colleges at what will likely be the beginnings of an economic depression stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic response.
The report outlines how dozens of colleges, mostly for-profit institutions, have shuttered in the last 40 years with little warning for students and teachers, and little intervention from the U.S. Department of Education or accreditors.
From the report:
Regulators often struggle to accurately identify the institutions most at risk of closure. Deeper research could help to pinpoint which institutions bring the most risk to students and taxpayers, and inform regulators efforts.
The federal government (and in particular, the Department of Education) could conduct a quantitative analysis of college closures to better understand the exact risk factors, incorporating internal indicators and knowledge of regulator actions.
Deeper recommendations on financial responsibility and financial warning signs are needed to better indicate risk of collapse based on poor finances. Several organizations are already underway with this work; their efforts should be considered seriously to prevent a premature rewriting of the rules.
Further analysis is needed to understand the riskiness of a college by the size of that institution. Some very large colleges seem unable to keep up with their growth, particularly when enrollment trends change. Other, very small schools are unable to meet the enrollment targets needed to sustain their institutions. Research could help to determine at what size private colleges should be subject to increased oversight, financial protection requirements, and even enrollment limits.
Allowing HBCUs to die has always been a sociopolitical proposition for most cities and states. The abiding question – is the effort to kill them worth the extraordinary amount of political capital with black voters and the media to make it happen? For differing groups of rich, old white men who usually bat around these questions in boardrooms and the halls of legislature, the answer has historically led to a “no” vote on wiping out black colleges.
(See Southern University at New Orleans, South Carolina State University, Cheyney University, and Denmark Technical College, just in the last decade.)
I’ve written before about how crisis allows for a pretty seamless changing of rules and cultural norms in the name of recovery. HBCUs could be in for a shocking reality if federal or state governments change their approaches to student loans, appropriations or capital financing in months and years following the coronavirus crisis.
The cause of wiping out HBCUs may be a little easier to justify with budget numbers, and a lot more bulletproof in the face of racial opposition. The fundraising proposition will be more difficult for HBCUs in jeopardy prior to the public health crisis. Legislative outreach will be virtually impossible as most local, state and federal governments will have economic restoration as the top priority; campuses that didn’t move the meter for economic development before the pandemic won’t be viewed as assets when it is over.
Elected officials and legislative priorities will change dramatically just as the pandemic response is winding to completion around November; just ahead of the presidential election, three months after the start of the fall semester and just weeks before our first look at budget recommendations at state and federal levels.
This is a report that is making the rounds now in political think tanks, legislative staffer email inboxes, and the U.S. Department of Education. It is the kind of document that will be cited in congressional hearings and have its language duplicated in bill proposals.
Plans for the future of HBCUs are being made right now, with very few HBCU stakeholders engaged in the conversation or aware of the information being used against them.
Millions of retweets, petition signatures and protesters working against mergers, closures or marginalization of HBCU campuses will have a huge opponent in just four words “we can’t afford them.”
This is not a joke and it is not an exaggeration. This is real and this is dangerous.
