This week I
am thinking about what it means to go back
to school in a country that still rations
opportunity. The stores are selling
backpacks and dorm décor, but the deeper
question is who gets access to education,
who must borrow for it, and which
institutions continue to carry the burden of
Black possibility.
The
fireworks have dimmed, and the
Fourth-of-You-Lie sales are waning. In this
country, we commemorate through commerce and
celebrate through retail activity, so even
though we are just a few days into July,
back-to-school signs are already shouting
from store windows and websites.
Who is
going back to school, and under what
circumstances?
As with
every milestone in this country, inequality
roars. Some students will return to school
with new laptops, quiet rooms, family-paid
tuition, and networks that cushion every
stumble. Others will return carrying debt,
doubt, family obligations, food insecurity,
transportation challenges, and the
accumulated disadvantages of underfunded
schools and under-resourced communities.
The
back-to-school season is marketed as a fresh
start. For too many students, it is also a
reminder that opportunity in America has
always been rationed.
That is why
Historically Black Colleges and Universities
(HBCUs) still matter. Indeed, that is why
HBCUs remain the vanguard.
The
vanguard is not always the largest part of
the army. It is the front edge. It moves
first. It absorbs blows. It clears the path.
By that definition, HBCUs have always been
the vanguard. They were built because this
country’s higher education system excluded
Black people by law, custom, violence, and
contempt. Their founding question was not,
“How do we reproduce privilege?” Their
founding question was, “How do we cultivate
genius where America has refused to see it?”
That
question remains urgent.
HBCUs
enroll only a fraction of Black college
students, but their impact is outsized. In
2022, HBCUs enrolled about 9 percent of
Black college students, yet they produced 16
percent of the bachelor’s degrees earned by
Black students in 2021–22. UNCF reports that
HBCUs generate $16.5 billion in annual
economic impact, support more than 136,000
jobs, and that the 2021 HBCU graduating
class is projected to earn $146 billion over
their lifetimes.
These are
not sentimental institutions. They are
economic engines, leadership factories, and
community anchors.
Still,
HBCUs are too often asked to do
transformative work with transactional
support.
That
contradiction is especially sharp now, as
federal student loan policy shifts under the
feet of students and families. The Biden-era
SAVE plan - Saving on a Valuable Education -
was designed to make repayment less
punishing by tying payments to income and
family size, reducing monthly payments for
many borrowers, limiting runaway interest,
and creating a shorter forgiveness path for
some small-balance borrowers. Now SAVE has
ended, and millions of borrowers have been
told to move into other repayment plans.
The change
lands first on borrowers already in
repayment, but current students are not
untouched. Undergraduates will face a
narrower repayment landscape when they leave
school. Families will confront new Parent
PLUS limits. Graduate and professional
students will face new borrowing caps just
as advanced credentials remain expensive and
often necessary. Graduate PLUS loans, which
previously allowed many graduate students to
borrow up to the cost of attendance, are
being phased out for new borrowers. Grad
PLUS was the backstop many students used
when tuition and living costs exceeded
unsubsidized loan limits.
These
numbers are not abstractions. They determine
who can become a nurse practitioner, a
physical therapist, a psychologist, a
professor, a public health leader, a lawyer,
a dentist, a physician, or a minister. They
determine who can move from the first degree
to the next rung. They determine whether
talent is nurtured or stranded.
For Black
students, the stakes are higher because the
debt burden is heavier. Black students are
more likely to borrow for college, more
likely to borrow more, and more likely to
struggle in repayment because the racial
wealth gap follows them from home to campus
and from campus to workplace. A loan policy
that may look race-neutral on paper can
still deepen racial inequality in practice.
That is the
context in which HBCUs do their work. They
educate students through inequality, against
inequality, and beyond inequality. They do
not merely polish privilege. They cultivate
possibility. They take seriously the
students America too often treats as
afterthoughts, and they turn potential into
leadership.
Having led
an HBCU, I know both the miracle, the math,
and the myth. At Bennett College, I saw
daily what HBCUs do with too little: stretch
dollars, nurture brilliance, hold students
close, and insist that Black women’s futures
were worth fighting for. I know the devotion
of faculty, the exhaustion of
administrators, the anxiety of families, and
the constant scramble for resources. I also
know this: HBCUs cannot be praised in
February and underfunded in July. They
cannot be applauded at commencements and
ignored in appropriations. They cannot be
celebrated as cultural treasures while their
students are left to navigate a debt system
that punishes aspiration.
The country
loves the symbolism of back-to-school
season. New backpacks. New notebooks. New
slogans. But the real question is not what
is on sale, it’s what is at stake.
If HBCUs
are the vanguard, then the question is not
whether they have earned our admiration.
They have. The question is whether they will
receive the investment, protection, and
respect that their record demands.
Back to
school should not mean back to debt, back to
rationed opportunity, or back to the same
old inequalities dressed up in fresh retail
packaging. It should mean back to
possibility. Back to purpose. Back to
institutions that have carried us when the
broader society would not.
HBCUs are
still carrying us. The question is whether
public policy will finally carry its share.
