The Perils of Black Excellence in Modern HBCUs

Executive Summary

Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) are confronted with a significant institutional dilemma: a history of chronic underfunding worsened by a surge in applications in the post-COVID era. The case of Howard University disenrolling 502 incoming students in July 2026 marks a collision of the two factors:

1. “Black Excellence” branding becomes a liability in the face of operational breakdowns related to administrative delays in financial aid applications.
2. Administrative hiccups, such as financial delays and lack of housing, hinder student retention, equity, and trust in the institution.

If HBCUs want to transform the cultural demand into sustainable institutional success, they must treat the student experience as a significant signal, improve their infrastructure, assess public-private partnerships, and implement shared governance. Real institutional leadership consists of being able to translate the promises of “Black Excellence” into practice.

The Dual Nature of “Black Excellence”

HBCUs have entered a true cultural moment since 2020. Thanks to former Vice President Kamala Harris’s ties to Howard University. Her rise has brought great attention to HBCUs. Time has described this as a generational moment. Concurrently, the ruling of the Supreme Court in 2023, which declared race-conscious admissions at elite private institutions unlawful, has resulted in a further surge of applicants to HBCUs. Inside Higher Ed has reported on the increase in applications across the whole sector. The same trend was noted by the research center of Georgetown University, as well as by Le Monde, albeit through a different framework.

This is the asset side of Black Excellence, and it is quite real. The paper Myths vs. Realities of HBCUs by Marybeth Gasman and Thai-Huy Nguyen shows how HBCUs are better at retaining Black students and providing them with upward mobility than many predominantly white institutions. Still, there is another side to the research that speaks about the limitations of such figures. A particular risk in this scenario is resilience-narrative capture. When students must experience bursar holds, dorm maintenance delays, weeks without financial clearance, and outages at the housing portal as if they were rites of passage—an expression of an HBCU experience rather than a failure of operational efficiency—an organization is turning itself into the source of a debt, which has to be paid off by students.

Robert Palmer and Sydney Freeman’s research highlights the way this phenomenon has a detrimental effect on the institution, which ultimately leads to turning short-run administrative decisions into long-time vulnerabilities: presidents do not undertake anything complicated in terms of political aspects, deferred costs are then imposed onto students, and when students drop out of school, their departure attests to the appeal of financial pressure the president wanted to avoid in his/her conversations. The dilemma of a leader is resolving the contradiction between the interests of external stakeholders and the need to take responsibility for delivering on promises made.

This commentary explores how the positive “Black Excellence” narrative, which can be a valuable branding asset for recruiting applicants, can turn into a managerial hazard if it replaces the need for fixing the issues on campus and providing such excellence to the students. In Marybeth Gasman’s discussion of the issue, which dates to fifteen years, one can spot the initial conflict, whereas Alton Schexnider’s Saving Black Colleges broadened it to the concept of executive modernization. Moreover, Palmer and Freeman’s Examining Ineffective Presidential Leadership at HBCUs clarified the concept of ineffective leadership. The students who lost their enrollment this fall semester can be perceived as the practical representation of an administrative failure.

Case Study — Howard’s Recent Operational Crossroads

Unenrollment, Days Before Move-In

In July 2026, just a few weeks away from the fall semester, Howard University notified 502 freshmen from the Class of 2030 that their admissions had been cancelled. The reason behind the cancellation was purely administrative: missed tuition payments, payment plans that were not signed, or scholarship paperwork that wasn’t recorded in time. Howard insisted that it sent multiple correspondences from March to July.

Students told WULA that their experience differed from Howard’s version of events: outside scholarships were still being processed and military education benefits suffered delays at the federal level, and some students didn’t receive emails from the university. Some students had shipped items to Washington, D.C., and some had quit their summer jobs already. The university stated that students could reapply but as transfer students.

The events surrounding the cancellation of the enrollment itself are not a scandal. Rather, it serves as a diagnosis. The situation clearly reveals an important contradiction faced by prestigious HBCUs in the context of 2020, namely, the fast-growing demand for education meets the institutional resources, which are not enough to satisfy the needs. In other words, applications to Howard University have risen from 33,000 to 37,000 for the Class of 2028 in large part due to the so-called “Kamala effect” (Diverse Issues in Higher Education). This happened at a time when Howard had already experienced the events of the “34-day Blackburn Takeover” in 2021 as well as a long period of issues with accommodation.

The incident of disenrollment itself is not a scandal. Rather, it serves as a diagnosis. The case reveals the paradox confronting every elite HBCU in the post-2020 context: unprecedented cultural demand coupled with institutional infrastructures that were never designed to cope with it. For instance, the number of university applications submitted to Howard increased from about 33,000 to around 37,000 for the class of 2028. This increase was driven largely by the “Kamala effect.” Yet, this growth arrived on the back of a back-office system that had already managed the 34-day Blackburn takeover of 2021 and, before that, the housing crisis on campus.

Before the takeover in 2021, Howard’s board voted unanimously to eliminate the affiliate trustee roles that were put into place for representatives of students, professors, and alumni before this decision. The modification of the bylaws was done on November 5, 2021, to establish a unitary class of trustees. Soon after, a lawsuit was filed by alumni representatives.

Administrative Infrastructure

The influence of operational strain goes well beyond unenrollment and housing. There were also delays in ERP system transfers, issues between the bursar’s office and the registrar’s office, trouble with the completion of financial accounts in the days leading up to each semester, and instability with the summer housing portal that were causes of student dropout, or summer melt, as it is known in student admission literature. According to The Hilltop’s retrospective one-year performance analysis of Blackburn’s demands, some progress has been made, but the problems experienced by students appear to continue.

The Howard Case is not an isolated example but rather is emblematic of the paradox of having an unprecedented cultural demand along with institutional infrastructure that has been underfunded and is not suited for the current environment, facing every elite HBCU today.

Systemic Disinvestment vs. Operational Execution

A true understanding of the challenges faced by HBCUs necessitates differentiation between two types of challenges: external disinvestment at the macro level and deficiencies in action at the micro level. Mixing the two categories of problems will not yield solid recommendations for governance.

The External Factors

In September 2023, NPR reported, citing a joint study by the Department of Education and the Department of Agriculture, that between 1987 and 2020, sixteen states underfunded their land-grant HBCUs by almost $12 billion as compared to other land-grant institutions, most of which were predominantly white. According to the report by Danielle Douglas-Gabriel, the amount indicated how the 1890 land-grant matching requirement had not been fulfilled for decades. In some individual cases, as noted in the Higher Ed Dive report, the amount of deficit has exceeded $400 million for a particular university, such as the University of Maryland Eastern Shore. The disparity in endowments also affects revenue generation of these universities, where even Howard’s endowment, the largest of the HBCUs, is inadequate compared to the amount of money available to similar universities with an excellent reputation.

Gasman’s Academe commentary is an example of the phenomena that were witnessed in the given context, claiming that HBCUs faced austerity challenges that were much greater than those linked to predominantly white institutions (PWIs).

The Internal Factors

Even though the external issue factors limit the resource base, this is not the only aspect to explain all the operational hurdles that can be faced by any company. For example, mold infestation in a dormitory is a facility management-related problem. The financial clearance problem of three thousand students that happened in late August might be a result of the workflow design problem. The issue of whether ERP migration occurs one week before moving into the dormitory falls within the field of project management. Deferred maintenance is used to free up resources for construction projects. However, such problems can still be solved professionally despite the lack of resources. In his book Saving Black Colleges, Schexnider claims that structural underfunding does not prevent the organizations from being efficient.

Performance-Based Funding Penalties

The third notable factor is the rise of governmental funding based on performance. An analysis by Justin Ortagus and his colleagues provides related results that show that implementation of PBF would often mean that the amounts of funding that HBCUs receive will decline relative to their PWI counterparts. This is because the graduation rates and time it takes an institution to grant a degree act against those educational establishments that deal with a larger proportion of Pell Grant students because the formulas do not entail any provisions for more money due to the challenges that first-generation and low-income students face in higher education. Jorge Burmicky, Claire Clarke, and Ronald Anderson have analyzed the given situation throughout different states, confirming that HBCUs serve 10% of Black students but account for a greater share of Black postgraduate students.

Student Activism as Governance Feedback Loop

A habit of interpreting student activism as a demonstration of unfaithfulness to an organization has persisted among directors. This interpretation is wrong from a practical standpoint because in most cases it represents a feedback system used by students at HBCUs to demonstrate problems that otherwise would be brought to the board’s attention only through lawsuits, dropout rates, or crises in mass media.

The history of Howard University itself is illustrative. There were protests in 1968 that brought about changes in the curriculum and in governance. The protests organized during a Board of Trustees meeting in 1989 were aimed at the appointment of the chairman of the Republican National Committee, Lee Atwater, to the board and were successful. The protests organized by HU Resist in 2018 helped bring to the surface the problems of mismanagement in financial aid. The events of 2021, understood as the takeover of Blackburn Hall, led to practical undertakings presented in the previous paragraph. Each of the mentioned cases resulted in governance reforms that could have been implemented without any occupation thanks to effective shared governance. “Access and Equity for African American Students in Higher Education,” published by Shaun Harper and his coauthors, is a classic study of the same issue, showing how administrative holds, barriers to financial aid, and unclear procedures of the bursar operate to the detriment of Black students.

Recent studies have now taken the analysis to the present-day generation. In their study, Nadia Njoku and David Murray argued that what HBCUs do today in terms of issues like housing and facilities and institutional transparency should be viewed as governance rather than a case of governance being interrupted. When students are the ones using the housing portal and financial aid and bursar systems, they are also the ones who particularly see when the systems fail in their functioning. Administrators who think of students as stakeholders to be controlled instead of seeing them as the ones who can provide them with information do not allow themselves to have an audit carried out.

Retention statistics make the argument regarding governance clearer. Non-academic administrative hindrances like issues related to finance, housing, or medications are among the main factors contributing to summer melt and the formation of stop-out cases throughout the sector. Every single operational failure that a first-generation Pell-eligible student manages before classes start constitutes a stronger reason to predict that this student won’t return. When the enrollment statistics are studied at the level of departments, administrative friction seems to be one of the most significant reasons for students dropping out, not only in comparison to academic performance but in general terms too. Every operational failure that a first-generation Pell-eligible student experiences during the weeks leading up to classes raises the probability of non-return.

The board-level implication is straightforward. Activism on the part of students and alumni can be cautiously interpreted as a free operational audit, a KPI that can reach the leadership without the need for consulting fees. However, colleges that decide to eliminate this KPI by stripping off the affiliated trustee seats, limiting accessibility of the town hall meetings, and responding to everything going on at campus through crisis communications instead of open governance turn off their own risk management system.

Strategic Priorities for HBCU Board of Trustees

Governing boards can execute three high-leverage priorities to ensure institutional stability:

1.      Operational Modernization

The most important area for investment by elite HBCUs is not in the construction of new buildings but in creating the technology infrastructure that’s necessary to modernize the schools—ERP systems, financial-aid systems, registrar systems, administrative staffing, and service agreements for utility and technology services. Harper, Patton, and Wooden’s (2009) work regarding transactional friction and Gasman and Nguyen (2015) address the fact that every dollar spent on modernizing technology is a dollar that generates a return in retention, while every dollar that is not spent generates friction for students. The Boards of Trustees should look at technology infrastructure as a category deserving capital projects and separate scoring criteria rather than a discretionary line item competing each year with the money for academics and new buildings. The crux of Schenkider’s argument is that HBCU boards need to change their mindset about modernization of executive technology and not blindly accept traditional administrative practices.

2.    Reframing Public-Private Real-Estate Partnerships

Housing issues at HBCUs often emerge due to public-private partnership (P3) models in which third-party operators like Corvias run facilities that the university advertises. Once responsibility for maintenance becomes blurred among the parties involved, accountability is diminished. The Howard AAUP report clearly states that the 2021 failures were largely caused by the conditions found in the Corvias contract combined with the university’s failure to oversee the P3 service delivery process. University boards engaged in negotiations of P3 contracts must insist on establishing strict service-level agreements, allowable maintenance response times, and the board’s audit committee transparency in terms of inspection results. The university should not engage in P3 arrangements that shift responsibility for service delivery but retain reputational responsibility.

3.    Restoring Shared Governance

The elimination of the affiliate trustee position at Howard points out how rationalizations in governance can create gaps in fundamental ways of getting feedback. Njoku and Murray (2024) point this out very clearly by saying that when it comes to today’s HBCU student advocacy, it is a part of governance and not a hindrance to it. This means that boards that want to make similar structural moves should consider the benefit of some inefficiency in their procedures compared to the loss of some immediate feedback mechanisms that cannot be duplicated by consulting firms in the industry. The reinstatement, or in the case of Howard, deliberation over the reinstatement of student, faculty, and alumni representation on boards of governance, will create a tool for identifying any possible risks in advance and will start the process of diagnosing any issues before it leads to possible unrest such as protests, lawsuits, or scandals in the media. Shared governance cannot be considered a concession to management but rather as a way to conduct checks and balances.

Lastly, boards should analyze the use of the notion of resilience in the context of conversations with the public. When the storytelling is approached in a way that normalizes operational challenges, there is no need to work towards addressing the issues that cause such challenges.

Impending Implications

The current cultural moment that HBCUs are experiencing is genuine, quantifiable, and uncommon. It has resulted in record applicant pools, brought in funding through celebrities and other donors to institutions that had been starved for funds for decades, and established equitable land-grant funding that has effectively gone missing from the $12 billion that countries owe and settlements such as a $577 million agreement made by Maryland. However, this moment does not happen automatically; it all depends on whether the executive leaders can turn the demand of the moment into a lasting institution that puts into practice administrative innovation and honest governance, no longer claiming that being resilient is enough to compete today.

Academic studies have been telling this story for the last fifteen years: Gasman (2010) on austerity governance; Harper et al. (2009) on administrative friction as equity; Schexnider (2013) on executive modernization; Ortagus and others (2020) and Burmicky et al. (2024) on the PBF penalty; Palmer and Freeman (2020) on the vulnerability of presidents; and Njoku and Murray (2024) on student advocacy. The absence of evidence is not an issue. The lack of execution is the key issue.

Black excellence is not in danger because of its critics. Black excellence receives harm from the institutions that treat it as an idea rather than an obligation to fulfill.