“It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten.” — Akan Proverb (Sankofa)
There is an old story told among the Akan of West Africa about a young man who left his village to study the ways of the marketplace. He was gifted — quick with numbers, persuasive with words, tireless in his industry. He returned years later fluent in the language of commerce, able to negotiate price and manage inventory with the best merchants the region had produced. But when the village elders gathered to ask what he had learned about water rights, about the law, about the obligations of the prosperous to the community that had sent him, he had nothing to say. He had been trained, thoroughly and well, for someone else’s purposes. The village had paid for a leader and received a clerk. This is not a story about ingratitude. It is a story about what happens when the institutions that form young people lose the plot of why they were built.
American universities increasingly exist to serve labor markets rather than form citizens. For Historically Black Colleges and Universities, this institutional deformation represents both a warning and an opening.
There is a revealing diagnostic embedded in a question any professor can pose on the first day of class: why are you here? The answers that come back — to get a job, to build a career, to make money — are not wrong, exactly. But they describe something much narrower than what a university was designed to produce. They describe a transaction. And the institutionalization of that transactional logic, across American higher education over the past four decades, has imposed costs that neither the labor economists who designed the system nor the accreditation bodies that certified it have been willing to fully account for.
The restructuring of higher education along market lines was not an accident. It was a policy choice, made in stages beginning in the 1980s, that progressively reoriented public universities toward workforce preparation, compressed the space available for general education and humanistic inquiry, and transferred the financial risk of education from public institutions onto individual students and their families. The student loan crisis is one symptom of this reorientation. The proliferation of vocational credentialing at the expense of liberal arts is another. Less visible but equally consequential is the effect on what universities produce in human terms — the disposition, analytical range, and civic formation of their graduates.
The student who arrives believing that a degree functions as an employment guarantee is not making a category error. She has been told this, repeatedly, by the institutions that enrolled her, the federal loan apparatus that financed her, and a media ecosystem that measures the value of a college education almost exclusively through salary differentials and debt-to-income ratios. The deeper problem is that she has also been deprived of a more useful framework: one that treats higher education as preparation not merely for employment but for the exercise of institutional power, the stewardship of community capital, and the formation of judgment capable of operating across a lifetime of economic and social change. Those are the competencies that distinguish a genuinely educated person from a credentialed one, and the distinction matters enormously in communities where institutional infrastructure remains fragile and leadership pipelines are thin.
This is where the argument becomes specifically relevant to HBCUs rather than to American higher education in the aggregate. The corporate conditioning of higher education has affected all universities, but its effects are not uniform. Institutions with established research endowments, mature alumni networks, and direct pipelines into elite professional employment have the institutional mass to absorb the distortions of vocationalism without catastrophic loss. Their graduates arrive pre-loaded with social capital, family networks, and access to the informational infrastructure of elite labor markets, which provides a buffer against the worst consequences of credential inflation and employer algorithmic sorting. For students entering higher education without that buffer which describes the majority of HBCU students, who are disproportionately first-generation, from households without investment assets, and entering labor markets where anti-Black discrimination remains empirically well-documented the consequences of treating college purely as a job training apparatus are considerably more severe.
The failure here is not primarily pedagogical. It is institutional. A university that produces graduates oriented entirely toward employment rather than toward the exercise of judgment and institutional agency will not generate the lawyers, policy architects, financial professionals, and civic entrepreneurs that HBCU communities need to build and sustain institutional power at scale. It will generate employees, some of them well-compensated who move through institutions built by others, serve purposes defined by others, and accumulate assets at the individual level while contributing nothing in aggregate to the reconstruction of African American institutional infrastructure. This is not a condemnation of individual ambition. It is an observation about systemic output. Systems produce what they are designed to produce, and the current design of American higher education, including at too many HBCUs, is producing workers rather than institution-builders.
The philosophical traditions embedded in African educational thought, the Akan concept of formation through relationship and ethical accountability, the Yoruba understanding of wisdom as holistic rather than merely technical, the West African griotic tradition of knowledge as communally held and intergenerationally transmitted, are not romantic additions to this argument. They are structural insights that happen to align with what contemporary institutional economics also recommends. Communities with strong institutions maintain those institutions through intergenerational transfer of knowledge, norms, and relational networks. Universities are among the most important sites of that transfer. When they are reconfigured as credentialing factories, they sever precisely the intergenerational connections that give institutions their durability.
The practical implication is direct. HBCUs that wish to build and sustain institutional power over the coming decades cannot simply replicate the corporate conditioning model of majority-serving universities and expect different outcomes. They need to produce graduates who understand that they are entering labor markets that are global, algorithmically mediated, and structurally hostile to workers without differentiated human capital and who have therefore been trained to think strategically about their own positioning, to build networks rather than merely seek employers, and to direct talent and capital toward institution-building rather than individual accumulation alone. This is not an argument against job preparation. It is an argument that job preparation divorced from institutional formation is insufficient, and that HBCUs have both the historical mission and the competitive positioning to offer something more.
The competitive advantage here is not sentimental. HBCUs were founded on the premise that Black Americans required institutions of their own not merely to access credentials but to develop leadership capable of navigating hostile environments and building community power from limited material resources. That founding logic which is fundamentally an institutional rather than a purely pedagogical argument remains operative. The hostile environment has changed its form, but not its fundamental character. The algorithms that now sort résumés for corporate HR departments are no less effective at producing racially disparate outcomes than the credentialing barriers of earlier eras. The private equity firms that have acquired significant positions in historically Black neighborhoods are no less effective at extracting community wealth than earlier mechanisms of economic predation. Navigating these environments requires precisely the kind of formation — analytical, strategic, institutionally literate — that the corporate conditioning model explicitly does not provide.
What this means in practice is that HBCU curricula, advising structures, alumni networks, and institutional partnerships need to be reoriented around a clearer theory of what the institution is producing and for what purpose. Producing graduates who are competitive in labor markets is a necessary but insufficient condition. The sufficient condition is producing graduates who are capable of building, leading, and sustaining institutions who understand capital formation, governance, and strategic coordination well enough to direct resources toward collective rather than purely individual ends. The universities that produced the lawyers and economists of the civil rights movement were not doing job training. They were doing institution-building, and the institutions they built changed the material conditions of an entire people.
That model does not require romantic nostalgia for mid-century higher education. It requires clear-eyed assessment of what the current model fails to produce and deliberate institutional design to fill the gap. HBCUs are not going to reclaim this ground through curriculum revision alone. They will reclaim it by building the endowments, research infrastructure, alumni capital networks, and employment relationships that allow them to make credible institutional promises to students; promises that extend beyond the transaction of the degree and into the sustained support of graduate careers and community investment. The credential factory model is a low-margin business that does not serve students, institutions, or communities well. The alternative is harder to build, but it is the only model that creates durable institutional power. That has always been the actual mission. The question is whether the institutions are prepared to pursue it.
Disclaimer: This article was assisted by ClaudeAI.
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