School Name: Tougaloo College
Median Cost of Attendance: $16 112
Undergraduate Population: 945
Endowment Needed: $304 516 800
Analysis: Tougaloo College needs approximately $305 million for all of its students to attend debt free annually. The amazing part of this is the number is that the school does not need that much. With its current endowment around $10 million it is not completely unfeasible to believe this amount could be accomplished within a decade. As with the other HBCUs in Mississippi it faces the demographic issues of the others. High levels of poverty in the state make it very difficult to build a large endowment for any higher education institution. It is often magnified within the HBCU sphere. Another major headwind is the student body size. Tougaloo simply is not producing a large enough number of students to create income power. The school has an excellent reputation among the inner HBCU circles but like many of the smaller HBCUs has a hard to leaving its footprint among the mainstream of African America. It is geographically close to Louisiana, which presents another problem area it must deal with. At the same token it also presents opportunity to influence parts of southeastern Louisiana. The enrollment at the school needs to grow at least double its current size, even healthier would be a growth of 150 percent in order for it to really make significant strides in earning power and potential donors. The school and its endowment are extremely well run for a school its size and thus as it continues down its current path, with any growth in demographics in its favor could see it becoming a major player in the HBCU endowment space.
As always it should be noted that endowments provide a myriad of subsidies to the university for everything from scholarship, faculty & administration salaries, research, and much more.
HBCU Money 