Article Originally appeared on Times Magazine.
An average of one in four students at traditionally black schools in the U.S. is a different race than the one the college was intended to serve.
When junior Brandon Kirby brought home an award from a national biomedical conference, it was a nice boost for his small college in a dying coal town in the heart of Appalachia.
It also seemed incongruous, given that the conference was for minorities, the college is historically black — and Kirby is white.
So are 82 percent of the students at West Virginia’s Bluefield State College, which nonetheless qualifies for a share of the more than a quarter of a billion dollars a year in special funding the federal government set aside for historically black colleges and universities in 2011, the last year for which figures are available. These schools, known as HBCUs, can also apply for federal loans through the Historically Black College and University Capital Financing Program. Last year, they got $303 million from that program, on top of $1.1 billion in previously approved loans.
The HBCU designation was created by Congress in 1965 to refer to any accredited school “established prior to 1964, whose principal mission was, and is, the education of black Americans.”
HBCU’s have always enrolled students of all races, but they are increasingly becoming less black. At some, like Bluefield, blacks now comprise less than half of the student body. At Lincoln University in Missouri, African-Americans account for 40 percent of enrollment while at Alabama’s Gadsden State Community College, 71 percent of the students are white and just 21 percent are black. The enrollment at St. Philip’s College in Texas is half Hispanic and 13 percent black, according to 2011 enrollment data from the U.S. Department of Education. Nationwide, an average of one in four HBCU students is a different race than the one the school was intended to serve, according to research conducted at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education.
Many HBCUs were started under segregation to provide African-Americans with higher education opportunities. After integration, they became seen as places for black students to overcome economic and educational inequities. Indeed, HBCUs have been instrumental in developing the black middle class, graduating substantial numbers of teachers, engineers and other professionals. But as schools that had been predominantly white opened their doors to other races, black students became scarcer at historically black colleges. To survive, the universities have had to market themselves to all students.
