School Name: Texas College
Median Cost of Attendance: $17 208
Undergraduate Population: 878
Endowment Needed: $302 172 480
Analysis: Texas College needs approximately $300 million for all of its students to attend debt free. Located 100 miles from Dallas, TX and 90 miles from Shreveport, LA puts Texas College in a sweet spot geographically. This could allow the school to grow triple in size in a very short period if its infrastructure could keep up with such exponential growth. Part of this growth could easily come from establishing a relationship for transfers from Southern University-Shreveport which is a two-year HBCU. Texas College is actually closer to SU-S than the flagship Southern University-Baton Rouge and could easily sway students who want to be away from home but not more than a few hours. With less than 1000 students the school needs to hit a growth spurt and fast in order to graduate enough alumni on an annual basis and increase the donor pool available to it. Of course at its current size there is the opportunity to build very intimate relationships with these graduates and establish donor relationship much earlier and on a personal basis. Texas College in 2012 led all HBCUs reported in NACUBO in terms of return on investment at 12.8 percent in a year when 70 percent of the top ten HBCU endowments had negative returns. This type of continued performance could bode well for them if they can get the raw dollars to boost the size of the money it is managing. The school has the talent to manage the money but its demographics need to grow for it become a relevant endowment in this era of expand or die.
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 