Category Archives: Editorial

Without Hyperactive Alumni, HBCUs Will Bear The Brunt Of The Building Tsunami Of College Closures And The End Of Their Blackness

Posted on February 9, 2024 by | 1 comment

“95 percent of colleges are tuition driven.” – Robert Franek, The Princeton Review

HBCU alumni and their alumni associations need to demand immediately to see the financials of their HBCU – this is of course assuming their alumni associations house is in order but that is another article for another day. At public HBCUs this is bit easier because of them being a state institution, but private and especially religious-based private HBCUs that effort can prove to be a lot more complicated. However, you do not need to wait until you see fire to call the fire department if you already smell smoke. The fire is there you just cannot see it yet. This is the harsh reality for America’s college business model and this should be the terrifying reality for HBCUs. Far too many colleges in America have unsustainable businesses models and nothing highlights how glaringly broken the model is like their acute reliance on tuition revenue and paltry or nonexistent endowment revenue.

How did we get here? For HBCUs this issue started at desegregation when well over 90 percent of college bound African Americans would matriculate through HBCUs. The Civil Rights Movement fundamentally changed that and struck a death by a thousand cuts to not only HBCUs, but African American owned and operated institutions in general over the past 50 years. We all know the saying about “their ice is colder” so and so forth. African American neighborhoods slowly collapsed, African American owned and operated hospitals have gone from 500 to 1, African American owned banks were at over 50 just 25 years ago now are at 16 – and falling, African American boarding schools once a mighty 100 now only have 4 remaining. HBCUs have not been spared either with the closures of St. Paul’s College, Knoxville College, Bishop College, and Lewis College of Business being the most recent closures over the past thirty plus years.

The reality of what started then for HBCUs saw its fuse lit for PWIs in 2008 amidst the Great Recession when the world economy and capitalism as we know it almost collapsed. As most of African America/HBCUs know, when European America/PWIs catch cold, we catch pneumonia, COVID, Spanish Flu, all while having no insurance or African American doctors. The Great Recession’s effects were many, but perhaps its greatest impact is that many families moving forward simply have chosen to opt out of having children. In the years following, America’s peak high school graduation class is set to graduate in 2025 (see chart below) and forecast of graduating classes thereafter begins a precipitous decline. This poses an extremely bleak outlook for African America whose 2024-2025 and 2025-2026 classes are nominally equal to the African American graduating classes of 2009-2010 and 2010-2011 where in all four graduation years the number of graduates was north of 470,000. The stark difference is that it has taken 15 years to recover to that nominal number all while the percentage of African Americans graduating peaked in 2009-2010 and 2010-2011 when African American high school graduates accounted for 15 percent of American high school graduates. Since 2010-2011, percentages have been declining and will struggle to reach 14 percent of American high school graduates in 2024-2025 and 2025-2026.

In contrast, the two groups who are seeing the most precipitous increase are Hispanic America and Asian America, both who by 2025-2026 will have seen their percentages increase for 27 years without interruption. It poses the question and conversation of whether or not HBCUs can remain predominantly African American for another day, but that day is sooner than later especially given that HBCUs only get roughly 10-12 percent of the college bound African Americans that graduate from high school. USA Today reports, “Yet while 67% of white high school graduates went directly to college in 2020, the most recent year for which the figure is available, 54% of Black high school graduates did, the National Center for Education Statistics reports. That’s down from 66% in 2010.” Needless to say African American education from Early Childhood Education through Graduate School simply does not appear to be trending in any positive direction. Taking 54 percent of approximately 470,000 leaves us with around 254,000 college bound African Americans for HBCUs and based on the 10-12 percent we recruit it means that only 25,000 are likely to find their way to the 100 HBCUs or 2,500 per school. The math as they say is not going to math if this holds true, especially given the reliance on tuition revenue.

According to Appily, “In the United States alone, there are more than 6,500 postsecondary Title IV institutions. Of these institutions, 2,189 of them are Title IV non-degree-granting. The rest are degree-granting, with 1,485 being 2-year colleges and 2,828 being 4-year colleges.” Our number to focus on is the latter number of 2,828 4-year colleges. Of that 2,828 we know approximately 100 are HBCUs or 3 percent. Appily also states that there are approximately 1,626 public degree-granting universities and 1,202 private degree-granting colleges. That means that overall, almost 58 percent of American colleges are public and 42 percent are private. For HBCUs, it is essentially a 50/50 split down the line when it comes to public/private. From a geographic standpoint, 331 4-year colleges are located in the Mid-Atlantic, 495 4-year colleges in the Northeast, and 457 4-year colleges in the Midwest according to CollegeSimply. This accounts for 45 percent of the 4-year colleges in the entire country. On the contrary, HBCUs are highly concentrated in the Southeastern part of the United States which is something of a doubled edged sword. Birth rates in the aforementioned PWI geographic strongholds post-Great Recession are where the highest concentration of concern are so this is a plus, but HBCUs while not predominantly located in those areas are located in predominantly in the Southeast where high school gradation rates are the lowest among all regions in the country and where the states with the highest poverty rates are concentrated. So while the population demographics may not be an issue the ability to afford college most certainly will be and with HBCU endowments being what they are that will be even more magnified. The real question then becomes who is most at risk.

It would be far too elementary to say that simply having a large endowment is an indicator, but as a starting point let us see where that takes us. NACUBO’s 2022 Endowment Study reports 136 public/private colleges/universities in America with endowments over $1 billion – there are no HBCUs. We could even go a step further and look at endowment value per full-time student (see below) gives us a bit more insight. It shows that a university such as Princeton for instance that cost around $85,000 per year to attend that the university would need an endowment of $1.7 million per student to allow a student to attend for free. As we see, Princeton’s endowment value per full-time student is almost $4.1 million which far exceeds the coverage needed. Spelman College is the leading HBCU in endowment value per full-time student at $218,792 (see below) but based on their almost $50,000 per year cost of attendance it needs approximately $1 million per student to allow a student to attend for free. So we see the stark difference in endowment coverage for its full-time students between Princeton and Spelman, the leading PWI and HBCU, respectively.

It is also worth noting the drop between Princeton and Harvard is a 51 percent drop while Spelman to Howard is over 65 percent highlighting just how scarce the resources per student even within the top HBCUs versus their PWI counterparts. This is vital to note because endowments fund far more than student scholarships. They fund professor salaries, research, utilities, and so much more. Endowments returns are also rarely fully available to the operations side of the university to use. Most universities, especially the larger endowments, reinvest a significant amount of their endowment returns back into the endowment. A controversial practice for many who feel like multibillion dollar endowments should be used to battle the college inflation cost. That though requires an institution to have a multibillion endowment to argue about. Again, no HBCU has even $1 billion let alone multiple.

Like most African American individual and household statistics the outlook and trendlines look bleak, but most of us do not know or interested in what the data says. African American institutional outlooks and trendlines are not immune and given institutions weight on individual and household outcomes their trendlines tend to be the vanguard or foreshadow of the future. However, all hope is not lost. HBCU alumni and alumni associations must realize this is an emergency. It was an emergency yesterday, it was an emergency ten years ago, and it was an emergency fifty years ago the moment the seed of desegregation was planted. Waiting on the benevolence of ‘The Double-Edged Sword of White Philanthropy’ is not a sustainable answer or strategically sound. The question now is what is the strategy and possibility ahead.

HBCUs and their proxies lack targeted and developed pipelines that A) are improving the K-12 outcomes of African American students B) ensuring that those that do graduate are coming to HBCUs. For HBCUs that still care about being dominant African American institutions there is a roadmap they can follow. The directory from Black Minds Matter list 461 African American owned schools that span K-12 that provide at the very least a starting pool to develop. This means HBCU alumni must invest to ensure that these schools thrive and that students ultimately find their way in a pipeline that ends in both HBCU undergraduate and HBCU graduate schools. Donating to these K-12 African American schools has a myriad of echo effects: more HBCU teachers hired, develop the curriculums and institutional learning of tomorrow that prioritizes attending HBCUs, purchase supplemental equipment like new technology, ensuring our children are properly nourished, and more. All of this investment and engagement should ultimately lead to moving the African American selection of HBCUs above and beyond the paltry 10 percent we now have of African American bound college students and perhaps can reignite the high school graduation rates.

The other conversation we need to have, albeit a very uncomfortable one is HBCU mergers, creation of HBCU systems, and new institutional formations that may allow us to be more financially sustainable. For instance, Fisk and Meharry are quite literally across the street from each other. Public HBCUs in each state merging underneath a joint system while the campuses remain separate. Or at the very least creating shared foundations, i.e. The (insert state) HBCU Investment Foundation that would manage the endowments and institutional development of all the HBCUs in that state collectively. For once we have to be aggressively proactive and not wait until crisis is upon us and be our usual reactive. Far too many of our HBCUs simply will not survive and those that do will be left on islands and in a collectively weaker state to battle external forces that we know would prefer African American institutions go away all together.

In order for HBCUs to survive for another century enrollment has to start trending upward and hyperbolically. We must also make some hard choices about what we are choosing to spend our limited institutional money on. Should our athletics move down a division to save millions? Probably, especially if that money can be used to strengthen our endowments, reduce student loan debt so our graduates can build wealth faster, and invest in the K-12 pipeline. This and many more hard conversations need to be debated and discussed among HBCU alumni immediately. We are late, but we are not too late. Decisive actions need to be taken to put far more of our schools on sound financial footing and increase the pipeline of students coming in and the endowment value per full-time student. Otherwise, we maybe seeing a lot of HBCUs being read their last rites.

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HBCU Money™ Turns 12 Years Old

Posted on February 3, 2024 by | Leave a comment

By William A. Foster, IV

“History shows that it does not matter who is in power or what revolutionary forces take over the government, those who have not learned to do for themselves and have to depend solely on others never obtain any more rights or privileges in the end than they had in the beginning.” – Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-education of the Negro

Last year, I said this was a marathon and not a sprint. However, at this moment a year later it does feel like we are picking up speed. Over the years there have been setbacks and bumps and ascending moments. Moments where I believed we were set to takeoff and moments where it felt like this was going to crash. It is truly amazing that 12 years in throughout everything, HBCU Money is still here and it is still strong.

There is nothing that I desire more than to see it expand, to see it be part of the fabric of representing the information of the HBCU nation and community. That we maybe empowered to shape our own narrative and that African America one days truly sees the value in our own institutions as others do. My goal is and continues to be that HBCU Money be part of the fabric of an ecosystem of HBCU Alumni Owned media that shows just how powerful we can truly be when we take ownership into our own hands.

As HBCU Money continues its path along with our sister blog HBCU Politics and more waiting in the weekends it will soon see the long transformation from caterpillar to butterfly – with a sting like a bee.

Keep your eyes on the horizon and know that the sunrise of our day is still upon us.

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HBCUs Have A $1.6 Billion Annual “Cost Of College” Deficit – And A Crisis Is Looming Because Of It

Posted on May 24, 2023 by | Leave a comment

“When you face a crisis, you know who your true friends are.” – Magic Johnson

Nobody ask African American institutions to do more with less than African Americans themselves. We ask Liberty Bank & Trust, the largest African American owned bank by assets, with just over $1 billion to be able to do the same things that J.P. Morgan can do with almost $3 trillion. We ask Howard University with an endowment of less than $1 billion to do the same thing Harvard can do with an endowment of over $50 billion. The perplexing insanity of expectation that we have for African American institutions while European American institutions who get virtually 100 percent of their community’s buying power and over 90 percent of African America’s buying power against African American institutions who get virtually 0 percent of non-African American buying power and less than 10 percent of our own community’s buying power is so often lost on us it is infuriating. We really do give little thought to how much of our educational value both economically and intellectually we pour into non-African American institutions. The intellectual value would require a study of its own, but the economic value we can actually measure rather quickly on the higher education level at least.

According to the Postsecondary National Policy Institute, “In 2020, 36% of the 18–24-year-old Black population were enrolled in college compared to 40% of the overall U.S. population. Since Fall 2010, Black student enrollment has declined from 3.04 million to 2.38 million, a 22% decrease: Undergraduate enrollment declined from 2.67 million to 1.99 million, a 25% decrease.” Next the Education Data Initiative’s reports, “The average cost of college* in the United States is $35,551 per student per year, including books, supplies, and daily living expenses.” Combine those two statistics together and you have a working “cost of college” revenue for African America that is approximately $84.6 billion annually. Unfortunately, HBCUs and their approximately 214,200 students would be valued at only $7.6 billion or less than 9 percent if HBCUs “cost of college” was comparable, but it is not. HBCUs “cost of college” lands around $28,064 annually meaning African Americans at HBCUs value is approximately $6 billion or 7 percent. Beyond building your own intellectual institutions that represent your intellectual interest to the world, just economically it makes more sense for African Americans to choose HBCUs. Unfortunately, the discount is not just based on African American families being economically poorer, but also because African America socially devalues African American institutions so much that they are forced to offer a discount to attract those who economics face the highest uphill battle. This would explain in large parts why HBCUs in general have such acutely high percentage of Pell Grant students. HBCUs may be on a race to extinction without increasing its percentage of African Americans choosing them for college or seeing parabolic growth in their endowments.

The economic model as it stands is simply not sustainable. An institution can not both fail to garner massive support from its community and be cheaper. Unfortunately, because African American households are economically poor and psychologically devalue African American institutions, then being more expensive than the norm is not an option. This harsh reality that HBCUs just to close the approximately $7,500 gap or $1.6 billion in cost would mean attaching an endowment of $150,000 per current HBCU student or $32.1 billion or increase African American students from 214,200 percent (9 percent African American HBCU students) of those attending HBCUs by approximately 57,000 to 271,200 (11 percent African American HBCU students) – an over 25 percent increase from current. The cost to obtain those 57,000 new students (infrastructure aside) according to Nova AI, “the National Association for College Admission Counseling, the average cost per student recruited by a four-year private college was around $2,433 in 2018-2019” would be $138 million. Many HBCU stakeholders would question whether or not most HBCU campuses could handle a 25 percent increase in their African American student bodies when the infrastructure (housing, faculty, etc.) is already a struggle. However the $32.1 billion options is worth noting since current HBCU combined endowments are just a little over $2.5 billion. There are also 23 European Americans with net worths more than $32 billion and 0 African Americans. If the path to survival seems like a gauntlet seems suicidal, then you would be correct.

Increase African American students by 25 percent (and all the infrastructure cost it would entail) or come up with $32 billion seems like being kind to call it between a rock and a hard place of a decision. A pipe dream solution would be that the top 100 PWI endowments valued at almost $600 billion would take 5 percent ($32 billion) and reallocate it to HBCUs with each PWI giving proportional to their endowments. But hell has a better chance of freezing over given our recent piece on “Tone Deaf: Harvard Launches A $100 Million Endowment To Itself To Study Its Ties To Slavery – An Amount Greater Than 99 Percent Of HBCU Endowments”. Trying to squeeze the Federal government for it seems just as foolish given African America’s lack of political power let alone HBCUs lack of political power. All of this without even considering the decline in African Americans going to college, which is likely a correlation with the African American high school graduation rate where African American boys are struggling to finish. There is also the real consideration that many African Americans are seeing less incentive to go to college given the student loan debt and lack of opportunity thereafter. It leaves the question how many HBCUs remaining can survive to the next generation.

Ultimately, the solution will likely and largely lie with HBCU alumni associations and their ability to become more than just social organizations, but truly engaged of the business of group economics. We have discussed previously the “12 Things Your HBCU Alumni Association/Chapter Needs To Do To Be Financially Successful” and the sentiment remains true and urgent. Making HBCU alumni associations financially stronger would also allow HBCUs to be far more competitive for African American students and work towards that increased enrollment while being able to build the infrastructure along side it. The question remains though, can HBCU alumni transform their alumni associations into financial powerhouses in a manner that would allow them to achieve such a goal? You never know until you try, but one thing is for sure you miss 100 percent of the shots you do not take and the consequences here are the institutional death of HBCUs as we know them.

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Do The Math: HBCUs Owning Their Own Tournaments Can Pay Better Than Hoping To Be Cinderellas Against PWIs In Theirs

Posted on March 21, 2023 by | 2 comments

“Take the fast road and get robbed then. Do you want to be famous or do you want to be rich? Because there is a likeliness that you might not be able to be both in this game. At a certain point you have to decide, do you want to be seen and known and look like you got bread and have everybody assume you got bread? Or do you really want to have bread and have people just assume you broke and not really getting it?” – Bun B

Jackie Robinson’s foray into Major League Baseball. Sam “Bam” Cunningham’s foray into PWI football. Texas Western’s championship in 1966 in PWI basketball. These are pivotal moments when an individual’s action would start the demolition of the institutions of African American institutional athletic power along with collapse of the infrastructure and ecosystems that made them such valuable assets to the African American community. In both instances, it would precipitate a talent and economic drain of African American institutions. 

The Negro Leagues would ultimately fold, ownership, executives, managers, hundreds if not thousands of jobs that were the byproduct of the Negro League wiped away to the sands of time. In 1947, there were zero African American owners in Major League Baseball. In 2023, there are zero African American owners in Major League Baseball. “Virtually all of the initial (Negro League) ownership was Black”, says Garrick Kebede, a Houston-based financial adviser and Negro League Baseball historian. In fact, across all major professional sports leagues (121 teams), there is only one African American principal owner – Michael Jordan, owner of the Charlotte Hornets and rumors are he is on the verge of selling the team almost eight decades after Branch Rickey poached Jackie Robinson. On the labor side, Major League Baseball reached its African American apex of players in 1981 with 18.7 percent of the players being African American. In 2023, that number has seen a precipitous decline down to 6.7 percent – a number not seen since 1957, a decade after Jackie Robinson entered the majors. Jackie Robinson’s move to the MLB did not just set the stage for the demise of the Negro Leagues, it would set the seed for HBCUs athletic demise just a few decades later.

A little over two decades later in 1966, Texas Western University (now, University of Texas El-Paso) would win the NCAA basketball championship with the first all-black starting lineup at a PWI and a few years later in 1970, Sam “Bam” Cunningham would take USC’s offense and run all over the all-white University of Alabama. Jerry Claiborne, an assistant to Head Coach Bear Bryant at the University of Alabama, famously said, “Sam Cunningham did more to integrate Alabama in 60 minutes than Martin Luther King Jr. did in 20 years.” But he did not integrate anything. Both instances simply convinced PWIs that Black athletes were the future of their programs and taking that talent from HBCUs could financially benefit them immensely among their STILL predominantly white fan bases and boosters. The fans and boosters just want to win. And while a decrease in European American players happened, the coaches, boosters, trustees, school bodies, and ownership in all the places that matter would still be what it has always been. Before enslaved Africans were brought to America, indentured servants who were the poor of Europe would be the labor pool of early America. This was to be no different of a transition. And ownership is ultimately the rub of where all of this lies for African America and HBCUs. 

The money behind the playoffs for football, the NCAA and NIT tournament for basketball, and the World Series for baseball and softball is dare we say – complicated. This in part is due to the way payouts are structured for each playoff/tournament and how schools and conferences choose to deal with the funds they receive for participating. For instance, in the NCAA tournament, “The NCAA urges the conference to distribute the earnings equally to the schools, but it is not a requirement. Typically, the bigger conferences will divide the money and send it to its member schools. The smaller ones, however, need the money to cover their own expenses, and then will send what’s left to its member schools.”, according to AS’s Jennifer Bubel. On the other hand, the NCAA’s ownership of the NIT operates a bit differently. “The NCAA has a complex way of rewarding teams for participating in March Madness. For the NIT, it’s much simpler. In addition to having travel, hotel and other expenses comped, each school in the NIT is given $4,000 for every game it plays. It’s a total payout pool of $128,000 this year.” says Sportico’s Eben Nvoy-Williams. Yet, Nvoy-Williams also points out that the NIT’s profitability to the NCAA while being lesser known is extremely profitable, “Though it’s nowhere near the commercial entity of March Madness, the National Invitation Tournament, or NIT, is a very profitable business for the NCAA. In 2019, the last year the event was held, it turned a $2.1 million profit on $3.3 million in expenses, according to financial documents. In 2018, the numbers were similar.” For football, “Each conference receives $6 million from the College Football Playoff for each team selected for a semifinal game and $4 million for each team that plays in a non-playoff bowl under the College Football Playoff.” reports Business of College Sports. Last but not least there is baseball, “In 2011, the NCAA included the College World Series as part of a $500 million television deal with ESPN for 24 sports championships through 2023-2024.” according to Huddle Up’s Joe Pompliano. Have we lost everyone yet? To sum it up, the finances of college athletics are extremely complicated. Adding to that complication is the fact that these playoffs and tournaments are all owned by the NCAA. But that ownership is now under threat as the Power 5 members realizing their own outsized power within the NCAA are vying to form their own entity. CBS Sports reports, “Majority of Power Five schools favor breaking away” and they primarily are looking to do so because they recognize they are a disproportionate contributor to NCAA events and more ownership would allow to share less and keep more within their conferences. Whether or not they determine that ownership is within the NCAA or a separate athletic association of their own is to be determined. Given their outsize influence in the NCAA though it may end up being a debate over how you pronounce tomato or potato. 

Many HBCU athletic supporters believe it is better that HBCUs fight for the respect and equality of their PWI counterparts in the NCAA as opposed to taking ownership of the HBCU Power Five (SWAC, MEAC, SIAC, CIAA, and GCAC) and forming the HBCU Athletic Association. This despite not having the alumni bases, boosters, or economic weight to be anything more than what we are in the NCAA’s ecosystem. In some respects, it harkens to the playing field of hip-hop where many artists finally started realizing that it was far better financially to be an independent artist than sign to a major label where an advance (also known as a loan) would keep the artist indebted to the label forever. A continued belief is that all we need to do is get the best athletes to come back to HBCUs and that resolves everything. Something no one seems to actually have an answer on how to accomplish or recognition in just how much that would cost – again, while not having the financial resources to accomplish it. Many think abandoning HBCU conferences and moving into PWI conferences is the answer despite multiple schools having tried and failing. HBCUs weakening HBCU conferences for PWI conferences is no different than African American athletes abandoning HBCUs for PWIs. It does not help us scale institutional power or circulate institutional capital. 

As it stands right now, the NCAA tournament is worth approximately $340,000 per win and with only the SWAC and MEAC participating (FBS schools only), even with a miraculous run it would workout to only $220,250 per school between the two conferences should they BOTH make it all the way to the Final Four. The secret to a conference actually making a lot of money in the NCAA tournament is having multiple teams from the conference get into the tournament. The SWAC/MEAC always only get one each and that is the automatic bid from winning their conference tournament. Money that a team earns in the tournament is usually (not required) split evenly among all of the members of the conference. Not always the case with smaller schools like HBCUs whose individual programs usually need every single penny. Given that every SWAC/MEAC athletic programs runs in the red and their 2019-2020 combined losses were to the tune of $161M it is hard to say whether the basketball programs that make it will share or can even afford to share.

The harsh reality of the probability for a deep run for HBCU men’s basketball is reflected in the SWAC/MEAC’s win-loss record in the tournament. Without comment, it is 4-55 all-time and we think that speaks for itself. It means that the SWAC/MEAC earned usually earn no more than the one unit times two teams for making it and this year that works out to a total of approximately $680,000 combined and $34,000 per school in the conferences if it is evenly divided. Can HBCUs create their own HBCU basketball tournament that would earn each school more than $34,000 per year? That is essentially the question that must be answered in considering creating our own tournament versus continuing to play in the NCAA tournament. If you included all 57 members of the HBCU Five, then that would need to be a tournament that produced a profit of $1.94M. Based on the NIT’s numbers, that would mean expenses of $3.1M or $55,000 per school approximately and revenues of approximately $5M or $87,700 per school. Again, this is a profit of almost $2M for the HBCU Five. The difference in this case is that of course the conferences would have an asset they could actually put on their financial statements that would be held in trust among their member institutions. Quite an enticing carrot in trying to recruit independent HBCUs to join the conference like Tennessee State University or PBIs like Chicago State University. The HBCU Five should be able to leverage a television contract for at least the cost of the tournament with everything else being profit thereafter. This could be repeated with football, baseball, and other sports.

Continued delusion around HBCU athletics competing with PWI athletic programs that have budgets ten times their size, a roster of boosters who write million dollar checks annually, corporate relationships with executives who also are PWI alumni and owned by PWI shareholders is a one-way train ticket to Diasasterville with the brake lines cut. You can not do what your competitor is doing when your resources socially, economically, and politically are as obtuse as HBCU reality. There are no HBCU boosters writing million dollar checks annually, there are no companies with HBCU executives and owned by HBCU shareholders who can provide multimillion corporate sponsorships, and there are reasons we all know and only say in private about why many African American high school athletes and their families overwhelmingly choose PWIs. We have to do different, think different, be creative, and solve the Rubik’s Cube that is not only the athletic conundrum we are facing but the lack of ownership crisis that continues to have a chokehold on African American institutionalism since 1947.

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HBCU Money™ Turns 11 Years Old

Posted on February 1, 2023 by | Leave a comment

By William A. Foster, IV

“The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts: therefore, guard accordingly, and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature.” – Marcus Aurelius

As we embark on our 11th year here at HBCU Money, we are not slowing down with the work we have before us. Our desire to continue to be a strong monetary and fiscal voice for the HBCU community is ever present. Covering the HBCUpreneurs who are growing amazing businesses, the business schools who are shaping tomorrow’s African American private sector leadership, HBCU economists who become the first to ever sit on the Federal Reserve board, and so much more. Our community has a voice and stories that need to be told, discussions that need to be broaden, and the hard questions that need to be asked. We have been there for it all and will continue to be there for years to come.

Thank you to everyone who has been there since the beginning and who has come to rely and trust that quality will always come first. In this day where sensationalism seems to be ruling over substance, HBCU Money and sibling blogs will continue to stand firm that there are those who desire and want to have their intelligence valued. That thinking beyond the headlines has not become a lost art.

Holding true to the saying, it is a marathon and not a sprint.

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