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Breaking Boundaries: How Risk Aversion Limits Black Youth’s Global Potential

Posted on August 4, 2026 by hbcumoney | Leave a comment

I think I’m the first man to sit on top of the world.– Matthew Henson

In 1893, a young man from Atlanta named William Edward Burghardt Du Bois boarded a ship bound for Hamburg, Germany. He was twenty-five years old, the first African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard, and he was going somewhere his community had never sent one of its own. His mother had died the year before. There was no institutional infrastructure to support the journey, no alumni network on the other side, no guarantee of safety in a world that had made its hostility to Black ambition abundantly clear. What there was, was a belief held by Du Bois and by the handful of people who helped fund the passage that the world was the classroom, and that a mind like his required the whole of it. He spent two years at the University of Berlin, studied under some of the foremost economists and sociologists of the age, traveled through Poland and Bohemia, and returned to America permanently transformed. The scholarship he produced in the decades that followed; The Souls of Black Folk, Black Reconstruction, the founding of the NAACP, a half-century of institutional architecture for African American intellectual and political life was shaped in no small part by what he saw, absorbed, and became when someone trusted him with the world. The question this generation must answer is whether we still believe what those people believed: that our children are worth the risk of sending them beyond what we can see.

The world has never been more interconnected, yet a troubling pattern persists in African American communities: our children are being held back from transformative global experiences that could accelerate their intellectual development and expand their life opportunities. While parents understandably want to keep their children safe, an ultra risk-averse mindset is creating invisible barriers that limit our youth’s exposure to the very experiences that build confident, globally-minded leaders.

The numbers tell a sobering story. African American students represent 13% of the U.S. college student population but account for only 6.1% of study abroad participants which is a figure that, while double the 3.4% share they held twenty years ago in 2003-04, remains deeply disproportionate. In 2023-24, there were nearly 300,000 Americans studying in other countries. Approximately two-thirds were white. Black students were 6% of that total and Black men specifically accounted for only 2% of all study abroad participants, despite men comprising one-third of the student population overall. Only 10 percent of U.S. undergraduates participate in study abroad programs at all, and only 25 percent of those are racial or ethnic minority students. This disparity isn’t about access to information or even solely about economics it’s about a cultural reluctance to let our children venture beyond familiar boundaries, even when financial aid and scholarships make these opportunities accessible.

The problem is compounded at the institutional level. At HBCUs specifically, only 3.4% of undergraduate students study abroad during their college careers, compared to a 10.4% participation rate across all institutions nationally. Critically, this gap cannot be explained away by a shortage of programs: at least 58% of HBCUs already offer study abroad opportunities. The barrier is participation, not access. And that participation gap has structural consequences that extend well beyond individual students.

When we examine the trajectory of successful global leaders, entrepreneurs, and innovators across all fields, a common thread emerges: early exposure to diverse environments, challenging experiences, and opportunities to step outside their comfort zones. Programs like Semester at Sea don’t just teach geography or culture they fundamentally reshape how young people see themselves in relation to the world. Students who circumnavigate the globe while earning college credit return home with expanded networks, cross-cultural competencies, and a confidence that comes from navigating unfamiliar situations successfully.

Yet too many African American parents hesitate when presented with such opportunities for their high school or college-aged children. The concerns are familiar: What if something happens? Will they be safe? Isn’t it better to focus on getting good grades right here at home? These questions, while coming from a place of love and legitimate historical awareness of real dangers, inadvertently communicate a limiting worldview to our children. The irony is profound. The same community that produced Frederick Douglass, who taught himself to read against all odds, and Mae Jemison, who literally reached for the stars, now sometimes struggles to let teenagers spend a summer studying at Oxford or a semester sailing around the world with their peers.

Consider the intellectual development that happens when a student participates in programs like Greenheart Travel’s high school abroad experiences or Oxford Summer Courses’ mathematics scholars program. These aren’t vacations they’re intensive academic and personal development experiences that challenge young minds in ways traditional classroom settings cannot replicate. At Oxford Scholastica’s summer programs, students engage with university-level material, debate with peers from dozens of countries, and learn to articulate their ideas in diverse academic contexts. They return home not just with impressive credentials for college applications, but with fundamentally expanded intellectual capabilities and confidence in their ability to compete on global stages.

Similarly, experiential programs like Peace Corps Prep for teens or wilderness expeditions through organizations like Camp Bighorn teach resilience, leadership, and problem-solving in real-world contexts that no classroom can simulate. When a young person learns to navigate challenging terrain, work with diverse teams, and push through discomfort, they develop the psychological resilience that becomes foundational for handling college pressures, career challenges, and life’s inevitable obstacles. The tragedy is that African American youth who miss these experiences enter college and career spaces at a disadvantage compared to peers who’ve accumulated years of such enrichment. They haven’t had the chance to fail and recover in lower-stakes environments. They haven’t built the international networks that often prove valuable throughout life. They haven’t developed the cultural fluency that makes them comfortable in any room, anywhere in the world.

We discuss achievement gaps in test scores and graduation rates endlessly, but we rarely address the experiential achievement gap that profoundly impacts intellectual development. When a student spends their summer studying advanced mathematics at Oxford alongside peers from Singapore, India, and Germany, they’re not just learning math they’re absorbing different approaches to problem-solving, different work ethics, and different ways of thinking about intellectual challenges. Research consistently shows that diverse experiences and exposure to different perspectives enhance cognitive flexibility, creativity, and critical thinking skills. Yet we’re denying our children these very experiences out of fear. We’re raising them in intellectual and experiential bubbles while the world becomes more interconnected and competitive.

The African American students who do participate in programs like Semester at Sea or international summer academies consistently report transformative experiences. They talk about finally feeling intellectually challenged, about discovering academic passions they didn’t know existed, about making connections that led to research opportunities, internships, and career paths they never imagined. They describe returning home with a clarity about their capabilities and their place in the world that their peers who never left home simply don’t possess. Research confirms what these students experience. Students who study abroad are approximately 50% less likely to experience long-term unemployment compared to non-mobile peers, and are more likely to hold positions involving cross-border cooperation and international responsibilities. Study abroad alumni contribute $1.8 billion in added income to the economy and support over 17,000 jobs. Beyond career outcomes, study abroad participants are 20% more likely to remain in school than students who do not study abroad, and those who participate graduate at a rate of 97.5% which is a figure that should command serious attention at institutions where completion rates are a persistent strategic concern. These aren’t marginal benefits they’re life-changing advantages that we’re systematically denying our children.

There is an additional dimension to this gap that connects individual outcomes to institutional strategy. Of all American students studying abroad in 2023-24, only 3% attended universities on the African continent and that number actually declined from the year prior. Meanwhile, Africa Core nations send more than seven times as many students to American universities as America sends to theirs. For African American students, this imbalance is not merely a statistic it represents a severed connection to the ancestral homeland of the global diaspora, and a missed opportunity to build the transoceanic institutional relationships that diasporic communities in other traditions have long leveraged for economic and political power.

The path forward requires honest conversations within African American families and communities about what we truly want for our children. Do we want them safe and close, or do we want them prepared for a world that won’t coddle them? Do we want them comfortable, or do we want them competitive with peers who’ve been building global competencies since middle school? This isn’t about being reckless with our children’s safety or ignoring legitimate concerns about racial discrimination they might face abroad. It’s about conducting realistic risk assessments rather than defaulting to “no” out of generalized anxiety. Most of these programs have been operating safely for decades, with robust support systems specifically designed to protect young participants. The risks of sending a teenager to a reputable international program are often lower than the risks they face in many American neighborhoods daily.

Financial barriers are real, but they’re often overestimated. Organizations like Greenheart Travel, Semester at Sea, and others offer substantial financial aid and scholarships. Black households represent 14% of total discretionary spending in the U.S., allocating $259 billion annually to non-essential purchases. Many families who could find funding for new cars, elaborate graduation parties, or expensive sneakers could redirect those resources toward experiences that would provide infinitely more value. It’s about priorities — what are we truly investing in when we invest in our children’s futures? Today’s economy rewards those who can think globally, collaborate across cultures, and navigate complexity with confidence. The jobs our children will compete for increasingly require the exact competencies that international experiences build: cross-cultural communication, adaptability, resilience, and global awareness.

When we prevent our children from accessing programs that build these competencies, we’re essentially pre-limiting their career ceilings. We’re ensuring they’ll enter college less prepared than peers who’ve already lived abroad, led wilderness expeditions, or studied at elite international institutions. We’re guaranteeing they’ll need to play catch-up in developing the global mindset that others have been cultivating for years. The world isn’t getting smaller or less complicated. Our children need to be prepared not just to navigate it, but to lead within it. That preparation doesn’t happen exclusively in classrooms in their hometowns. It happens when they’re challenged to adapt, to think differently, to see themselves as part of a global community rather than just their immediate environment.

Our ancestors understood a fundamental truth: when spaces exclude you, you don’t just fight for access — you build your own. They didn’t wait for permission to educate their children; they built schools, colleges, and entire universities. They didn’t just seek integration into hostile towns; they built Tulsa’s Black Wall Street, Rosewood, and thriving communities across the country. They created what they needed when the world said they couldn’t have it. HBCUs weren’t created because Black people wanted segregation; they were created because we understood that if spaces wouldn’t welcome us, we had both the capability and responsibility to build spaces that would. When entire towns were torched, our ancestors rebuilt. When banks wouldn’t lend, we created our own financial institutions. When we needed safe spaces for our children to learn and grow, we built colleges that still stand as testaments to our determination and vision. This same spirit must animate our approach to global educational experiences. If we’re uncomfortable sending our children into predominantly white international programs where they may face isolation, microaggressions, or cultural insensitivity, then the answer isn’t to keep them home it’s to build programs that center their cultural identity while expanding their global consciousness.

Imagine study abroad programs that connect African American high school students with peers in Ghana, Nigeria, South Africa, Brazil, Trinidad, or London’s vibrant Black British communities. Programs where our children don’t just study European history and culture, but trace the African diaspora’s global influence and contributions. Where they learn Portuguese in Salvador, Bahia — the most African city outside of Africa — while studying Afro-Brazilian culture, resistance movements, and contemporary Black excellence. Consider summer academies at universities in Senegal or Jamaica, where African American students engage in rigorous STEM education while surrounded by Black professors, Black excellence, and societies where they are the majority, not the minority. Think about wilderness expeditions through African national parks led by Black conservationists, or maritime programs exploring the Caribbean’s ecology and history aboard vessels captained by people who look like our children.

These aren’t fantasies these are achievable programs that Black institutions, organizations, and entrepreneurs could create if we marshaled our resources and will. The global African diaspora numbers over 200 million people across six continents. Our children could literally travel the world while remaining connected to communities that share their heritage, understand their experiences, and celebrate their identity. And given that research confirms a direct correlation between studying abroad and Black identity development with Black students who study abroad demonstrating stronger self-efficacy, greater career clarity, and deeper cultural confidence — the case for diaspora-centered programming is not merely sentimental. It is institutional.

Programs designed by and for African American youth could address both the legitimate concerns parents have and the developmental needs our children deserve. They would provide cultural affirmation alongside global exposure. Students could develop international competencies while being surrounded by affirming environments that reinforce rather than challenge their sense of self-worth and belonging. Instead of being the only Black face in a room in Oxford, imagine our children learning from Black scholars at the University of Cape Town, engineers in Lagos’s tech hub, entrepreneurs in Kingston, or artists in Paris’s thriving African diaspora communities. This mentorship from global Black excellence would provide role models and guidance that looks like them and understands their experiences.

Learning about African civilizations’ contributions to mathematics while standing in Ethiopia, or studying the Haitian Revolution where it happened, or exploring maroon communities that successfully resisted slavery — these experiences don’t just teach history, they build pride and a sense of connection to a legacy of brilliance and resistance. This historical and cultural context strengthens identity in ways that traditional study abroad programs simply cannot. The relationships our children would build with peers from across the African diaspora would create networks that could support them throughout their lives and careers, while also helping them understand the diversity within Blackness globally. These networks within the diaspora become invaluable resources as our children pursue opportunities anywhere in the world.

Creating such programs would require the same institutional building that created HBCUs. We need investment from Black wealth. A fraction of African American financial resources, strategically invested, could create endowments for scholarship funds that make these programs accessible to students across economic backgrounds. We need new, independent organizations built specifically for this purpose. Black educators and entrepreneurs must create dedicated nonprofits and social enterprises focused exclusively on providing culturally-centered global education for K-12 students. These organizations would develop curricula, establish safety protocols, build partnerships with host communities in the diaspora, and market these opportunities to families who would trust programs designed with their children’s specific needs in mind. These new institutions would employ Black professionals as program directors, academic coordinators, and counselors, creating jobs within our community while building institutional capacity. Black professionals working in international settings must step up as local coordinators and mentors. Every Black American living in Ghana, South Africa, Brazil, the Caribbean, or anywhere in the diaspora represents a potential program site and mentor. We could create networks of willing professionals who would host students, provide professional mentorship, or facilitate cultural experiences. This distributed network would make programs both more affordable and more meaningful, as students would be embedded in authentic diaspora communities rather than tourist experiences.

It’s time for African American parents, educators, and community leaders to have difficult conversations about risk, opportunity, and what we truly owe the next generation. We owe them more than safety, we owe them preparation. We owe them experiences that will make them competitive, confident, and capable in any context they choose to enter. This means two parallel paths forward. First, actively researching and utilizing existing quality programs whether at Oxford, Semester at Sea, or elsewhere when they serve our children’s needs. But second, and perhaps more importantly, it means building our own infrastructure for global education that centers Black youth culturally while expanding them globally. We can no longer accept the false choice between keeping our children close and comfortable or sending them into spaces that weren’t designed with them in mind. Our ancestors didn’t accept such false choices they created third options, built new institutions, and forged paths where none existed.

The question facing African American families isn’t whether these programs are perfectly safe — nothing is. The question is whether the risk of inaction, of limiting our children’s exposure and experiences, is greater than the managed risks of letting them spread their wings globally. The evidence overwhelmingly suggests it is. Our children deserve the chance to develop into the globally-minded, intellectually sophisticated, culturally fluent leaders the world needs. That development doesn’t happen by accident, and it rarely happens when we keep them in familiar, comfortable environments. It happens when we trust them with challenges, support them through discomfort, and give them permission to become citizens of the world rather than just residents of their neighborhoods.

The choice is ours. We can continue the pattern of risk aversion that limits our children’s potential, or we can break the cycle and give them the global experiences that will unlock possibilities we might not even imagine. Better yet, we can build the institutions and programs that make these experiences culturally affirming, academically rigorous, and accessible to every Black child with the desire to see the world. Their future — and our community’s future — depends on which path we choose.

Disclaimer: This article was assisted by ClaudeAI.

HBCU B-Schools’ Leadership Still Embarrassingly Lacking In HBCU Alumni

Posted on September 9, 2025 by hbcumoney | Leave a comment

The most difficult thing in life is to know yourself. — Thales

The Graham Principle: Why HBCU Business Schools Must Lead From Within

Warren Buffett’s rejection by Benjamin Graham is more than a quaint footnote in the history of American finance. It is a parable about institutional loyalty, strategic insulation, and the deliberate construction of parallel economic power. Graham, the architect of value investing, declined to hire the future Oracle of Omaha not for lack of qualification but for reasons of principle. At a moment when Wall Street’s doors remained firmly closed to European American Jews, Graham made a conscious decision to build from within his own community. His hiring practices were not sentimental. They were strategic—an act of institutional self-preservation in a market structured against him. He understood that talent required more than identification; it required cultivation, protection, and deliberate positioning within institutions the community itself controlled.

A decade has passed since anyone undertook a comprehensive examination of leadership trends within HBCU business schools. The intervening years might reasonably have produced a renaissance of internal cultivation—an era defined by deliberate succession planning, alumni-led governance, and a clear institutional commitment to developing leadership from within. That hope has gone largely unrealized. Across the landscape of HBCU business education, the preference for external hires persists, the pipeline for internal leadership development remains thin, and the governing logic of these schools continues to defer, implicitly or explicitly, to standards of excellence defined by the very institutions that historically excluded Black scholars from full participation.

The appointment of deans and senior faculty from predominantly white institutions is routinely framed as a commitment to excellence—the familiar rhetoric of meritocracy dressed in the language of best practices. What this framing systematically obscures is the structural disadvantage HBCU graduates face in academic and professional labor markets, disadvantages produced not by deficiency but by decades of underfunding, network exclusion, and credential discrimination. When HBCU business schools accept this framing uncritically, they do not rise above structural inequality; they reproduce it within their own walls. The result is a business education ecosystem that remains institutionally disconnected from the communities it is chartered to serve.

Of the 85 accredited HBCU business schools and departments operating under the latest available data, fewer than 20 percent are led by HBCU alumni. Of that minority, fewer than half hold both undergraduate and graduate degrees from HBCUs, further attenuating the institutional knowledge that might otherwise be reinvested across the ecosystem. The contrast with elite PWI practice is clarifying. Approximately 75 percent of business school deans at Ivy League institutions hold at least one degree from an Ivy League school. This is not coincidence. It reflects a deliberate institutional philosophy that prizes continuity, internal network loyalty, and cultural capital accumulated within the institution itself. These schools understand that leadership is not merely a management function. It is an expression of institutional identity and a mechanism for transmitting values across generations of students and faculty.

HBCU business schools have not absorbed that lesson with equivalent seriousness. The absence of a deliberate succession strategy—one that identifies, mentors, and elevates internal talent over sustained periods—constitutes a structural failure that compounds over time. When young Black scholars do not see themselves reflected in the senior leadership of their own institutions, the implicit signal is that the path to authority runs elsewhere. And so it does. Promising scholars educated at HBCUs routinely migrate to PWIs for higher compensation, greater prestige, or more robust professional infrastructure. When those scholars eventually ascend to positions of institutional leadership, their loyalty and networks do not reliably return. The brain drain becomes self-reinforcing, and the institutions that initially formed these scholars see little of the compounded return on that investment.

This pattern might be called institutional amnesia—a collective failure to study, internalize, and replicate the strategies through which other minority communities have built durable institutional ecosystems. Jewish, Catholic, and Mormon institutions have each constructed powerful networks by systematically aligning leadership selection with community identity, concentrating institutional resources within their own structures, and maintaining cultural continuity across leadership transitions. They benchmark their performance against their own historical trajectories and communal objectives, not against the preferences of institutions oriented toward different communities and different purposes. HBCU business schools, by contrast, frequently evaluate themselves against ranking systems and accreditation frameworks built around metrics that reflect neither their mission nor the specific market failures their students are positioned to address.

The strategic costs of this posture are substantial and compounding. Recruitment searches for business school deans, when conducted through executive search firms, routinely exceed $250,000 in direct expense. When that investment produces a dean with limited institutional loyalty and no deep roots in the community the school serves, the organization is exposed to the further costs of short tenures, strategic discontinuity, and misaligned fundraising. Business schools function as economic engines—engines that generate networks, direct student talent toward particular career paths, shape research agendas, and produce or fail to produce the intellectual infrastructure that sustains community-level economic development. Leadership that lacks genuine cultural and strategic commitment to the HBCU mission cannot be expected to operate that engine in the community’s interest.

The curriculum consequences are equally significant. HBCU business schools exist in a moment when the structural dimensions of Black economic life—persistent wealth gaps, discriminatory access to capital, the collapse of Black-owned financial institutions, the chronic underdevelopment of Black neighborhoods—constitute some of the most pressing and tractable problems in American political economy. Addressing those problems requires not merely academic competence but institutional orientation. Who is designing curricula around cooperative economics and community wealth retention? Who is building research programs on Black entrepreneurship, the historical function of Black banking, and the mechanics of financial exclusion? Who is developing partnerships with Black-owned financial institutions, investment funds, and real estate developers that would allow students to graduate with network capital as well as intellectual credentials? These priorities require leadership that has been formed within the ecosystem, that understands its history, and that has a personal stake in its long-term trajectory.

The Graham analogy holds at precisely this level of analysis. Graham’s decision to hire from within his community was not a concession to sentiment. It was a calculated judgment that institutional effectiveness depended on leadership whose values, networks, and long-term interests were structurally aligned with the institution’s mission. He was not interested in demonstrating that his firm could attract talent validated by mainstream institutions. He was interested in building something that would compound over time within his own community’s orbit. The question for HBCU business school leadership is whether a comparable institutional logic is possible—and whether the will exists to pursue it.

The remedies are neither mysterious nor beyond reach, but they require deliberate institutional action sustained over years rather than episodic declarations of intent. HBCU business schools must establish formal succession pipelines that identify promising alumni early, support their doctoral training and early-career development, and create structured pathways back into institutional leadership. Mentorship programs, leadership fellowships, and transparent internal promotion tracks are the instruments through which this pipeline is built and maintained. Without them, talented HBCU alumni will continue to be absorbed by institutions with superior infrastructure, and the cycle of external dependence will continue.

Boards of trustees and presidential leadership must also reckon honestly with the hiring criteria that have produced current outcomes. Cultural alignment, mission literacy, and demonstrated investment in HBCU communities should carry weight commensurate with academic credentials in dean and faculty searches. These are not competing values. They are complementary ones, and institutions that treat them as such will find that the pool of qualified, mission-aligned candidates is larger than conventional search processes have suggested.

The benchmarks against which HBCU business schools measure their progress require reconstruction as well. Chasing rankings defined by and for PWIs produces strategic mimicry rather than institutional distinctiveness. The appropriate comparators are institutions that have used internal leadership and community alignment to produce durable economic outcomes for the communities they serve. The relevant question is not whether an HBCU business school resembles Wharton. It is whether that school is building the human capital, research infrastructure, and network density that the African American institutional ecosystem requires to become economically self-reinforcing.

Alumni hold a particular form of leverage in this process that has been insufficiently exercised. Philanthropic capital directed toward HBCU business schools carries with it the legitimate expectation of institutional integrity. Alumni who fund these schools are entitled to ask whether the institutions are investing in their own—whether succession planning exists, whether internal candidates are being developed and promoted, whether the school’s research and curricular agenda reflects the community’s strategic needs. These are not hostile demands. They are the expressions of institutional ownership that any serious donor community directs toward the organizations it sustains.

The broader HBCU ecosystem has long understood, at least in principle, that institutional density is the precondition for community resilience. Strong communities are not produced by exceptional individuals operating in isolation. They are produced by networks of reinforcing institutions—universities, banks, hospitals, media organizations, research centers—that retain capital, concentrate talent, and coordinate strategically across organizational boundaries. Business schools are a critical node in that network. They are the institutions most directly positioned to translate academic investment into economic infrastructure, to convert tuition into entrepreneurial capacity, and to channel philanthropic capital into research that serves the community’s long-term interests. Their leadership must reflect that position.

The failure to develop and elevate HBCU alumni into business school leadership is not simply an administrative oversight. It is a strategic error with consequences that extend well beyond the schools themselves. Every dean recruited from outside the ecosystem without a plan to develop internal successors is a missed compounding opportunity. Every promising scholar who departs for a PWI without a pathway back represents a loss of accumulated institutional knowledge that will not return on its own. Every curriculum designed to satisfy external accreditation standards at the expense of community-relevant content is a semester in which the institution’s potential as an engine of economic development goes partially unrealized.

Graham built his firm on the premise that talent required institutional protection to reach its full potential—that external markets, structured against your community, could not be trusted to recognize or reward what you were building. That premise has lost none of its force. HBCU business schools that internalize it, and act on it with the rigor and consistency it demands, will be better positioned to fulfill the extraordinary institutional promise that their founding represented. Those that continue to defer to external validation and outsourced leadership will find that the promise remains exactly that—unrealized, and over time, increasingly difficult to recover.

Disclaimer: This article was assisted by ClaudeAI.

Ohio’s Unclaimed Billions Could Empower Central State and Wilberforce Instead of Enriching the NFL

Posted on July 18, 2025 by hbcumoney | Leave a comment

You can’t have political power unless you have economic power. You can’t have economic power unless you own something. — Dr. Claud Anderson

In the quiet towns of Wilberforce, Ohio, two institutions — Central State University and Wilberforce University — have stood for generations as monuments of African American intellectual resilience and historical fortitude. Founded in eras when the very idea of African American higher education was radical, both institutions have graduated engineers, entrepreneurs, theologians, and teachers who seeded entire Black communities with knowledge and leadership. Yet, in 2025, they remain financially fragile — their endowments barely grazing the thresholds needed for robust institutional health.

Meanwhile, Governor Mike DeWine just approved $600 million in state funds — sourced from Ohio’s $4.8 billion in unclaimed assets — to support the Cleveland Browns’ new domed stadium in Brook Park, an NFL franchise owned by billionaires. The Haslam Sports Group, the Browns’ owners, is contributing an additional $1.2 billion to the project, and Cuyahoga County is expected to round out the financing with another $600 million. The stadium, estimated at $2.4 billion, is framed as a jobs and tourism engine — the typical rationale for professional sports subsidies. But beneath the surface lies a deeply racialized economic pattern: Black bodies as capital, Black institutions as afterthoughts.

Let us state this plainly — $200 million in endowment funding (split between Central State and Wilberforce University) would account for just 4.17% of the $4.8 billion in unclaimed assets Ohio plans to repurpose. Yet it would transform the future of two of America’s most storied HBCUs, whose total combined endowments likely do not reach even $20 million today.

The $200 Million That Could Rebuild Black Educational Futures

An endowment is the economic engine of institutional independence. It enables faculty hiring, scholarships, research labs, infrastructure repair, and the kind of multi-generational planning that insulates a university from the unpredictable winds of politics and philanthropy.

Central State University, Ohio’s only public HBCU, receives state support — but suffers from persistent underfunding compared to Ohio’s predominantly white public institutions.
Wilberforce University, a private HBCU affiliated with the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the first college owned and operated by African Americans, has been in survival mode for decades, enduring accreditation threats and enrollment declines — largely due to chronic financial starvation.

A $100 million endowment per institution, conservatively managed with a 5% annual drawdown, would provide each HBCU with $5 million per year in perpetuity. That’s enough to:

Offer full-ride scholarships to dozens, if not hundreds, of students.
Endow faculty chairs in business, STEM, and African American studies.
Fund campus maintenance and restoration for aging facilities.
Launch centers focused on African American policy, agriculture, or entrepreneurship.
Reduce reliance on tuition and thus open doors to more low-income students.

In short, it would empower these institutions to build, not just survive.

Meanwhile, the Billionaire NFL Franchise Gets a Taxpayer Bailout

The Cleveland Browns’ new stadium is not just an economic development plan — it’s a public-funded monument to private wealth. Let us remember: The NFL is a tax-exempt cartel whose franchises are operated by billionaires and whose profits — through broadcast rights, luxury boxes, and merchandise — soar year after year.

The public rationale for subsidizing stadiums is that they will generate jobs, tourism, and long-term economic vitality. Yet, study after study from economists across ideological spectrums consistently shows that these promises are overstated or entirely unfounded. Most NFL stadiums create a short-term construction boom, followed by long-term debt and opportunity costs.

But perhaps more galling is this: the economic lifeblood of the NFL is disproportionately Black men. While roughly 13% of the U.S. population is Black, nearly 60% of NFL players are African American. These players, often trained in underfunded high schools, many from single-parent households and first-generation college trajectories, generate billions — yet the communities and institutions from which they originate remain underdeveloped and neglected.

It is a grotesque inversion: Black talent builds white wealth, while Black institutions remain marginal.

Black Athletes, White Wealth, and the Poverty of Institutional Ownership

The NFL, and by extension the Cleveland Browns, benefits from a system where the labor is Black, but the ownership is almost entirely white. Out of 32 NFL teams, only one have non-white principal owners: Shahid Khan, a Pakistani-American who owns the Jacksonville Jaguars.

Meanwhile, no HBCU alum holds equity in any major professional sports franchise, despite HBCUs being core contributors to the American athletic pipeline that fuels leagues like the NFL and NBA.

Despite producing generations of elite athletes, coaches, and sports executives, no collective of HBCU alumni has leveraged its wealth or influence to acquire equity in a major professional sports franchise, leaving the economic rewards of Black athletic labor concentrated elsewhere.

Imagine a model where Ohio had used even half of the $600 million to create a Black Education & Sports Endowment, partially controlled by a consortium of HBCUs, Black public schools, and community development organizations. The returns from that endowment could support thousands of students, community health centers, literacy programs, and STEM labs for generations.

Instead, we see yet another example of extractive economics, where African American physical, cultural, and intellectual capital is used to build empires for others, while Black institutions — including HBCUs — remain dependent on begging, philanthropy, and hope.

Why Unclaimed Funds Should Serve The Forgotten

Ohio’s decision to redirect $1.7 billion in unclaimed funds to cover state expenditures is fiscally creative — but morally questionable. These are not “free” funds. They are monies left in dormant bank accounts, uncashed checks, unclaimed insurance payouts — many of which disproportionately belong to low-income individuals who lacked the resources or knowledge to retrieve them.

Data suggests that Black Americans are disproportionately represented among unclaimed property holders — in part due to higher levels of economic displacement, address changes, and financial exclusion. Redirecting these funds to subsidize an NFL franchise, instead of redressing the institutional and educational gaps that created that unclaimed status, is a betrayal.

Ohio could have:

Created a permanent Black Higher Education Trust, benefiting Central State and Wilberforce.
Used 5% of unclaimed funds — about $240 million — to fund Black-led public health initiatives in underserved areas.
Directed even 1% of those funds — roughly $48 million — to finance land acquisition and economic development for Black-owned businesses.

Instead, we’ve chosen to rescue billionaires from spending their own money.

HBCU Endowments Are An Economic Empowerment Issue — And the Gateway to Political Power

Endowments are more than just financial assets. They are strategic tools of power — insulating institutions from political winds, enabling bold experimentation, and giving their stakeholders the leverage to influence policy, not just plead for it.

For African America, the chronic undercapitalization of HBCUs is not merely a funding gap — it is an economic power vacuum that undercuts the entire community’s ability to advocate effectively for systemic redress.

While Williams College and Bowdoin College — small liberal arts schools with fewer than 2,500 students — boast endowments of $3.7 billion and $2.58 billion respectively, many HBCUs operate with endowments under $50 million, and some under $10 million. This discrepancy is not accidental. It is the compounding result of centuries of exclusion from generational wealth accumulation, philanthropic networks, and public investment.

Until African American institutions — especially HBCUs — are armed with independent and sizable capital, they will remain vulnerable to the whims of legislatures, accreditation bodies, and philanthropic trends. Worse, they will lack the institutional might to challenge inequity in courtrooms, boardrooms, and ballot boxes.

The fight for reparations, education equity, health justice, and fair housing requires leverage — and leverage requires capital. Political power without economic power is temporary and transactional. But economic power institutionalized through endowments can translate into permanent seats at the table, not just access to it.

Endowing HBCUs, then, is not a charitable gesture. It is a foundational strategy for African American sovereignty and redress. Without institutions that are capable of outlasting election cycles and media trends, African America will continue fighting uphill with borrowed tools and limited voice.

Ohio had a chance to fund that future. Instead, it chose to subsidize a stadium — once again reminding us: until we build our own institutions, we will always be asked to cheer from the stands while others profit from our play.merican educational infrastructure for the next 100 years. Instead, he invested in a stadium with a 20-year shelf life.

Choose the Future You Fund

In 2029, a new domed stadium will open in Brook Park. It will gleam with LED lights and imported steel. It will be filled with cheering fans on Sundays and concerts on Saturdays. The Browns may even win a playoff game or two.

But just 50 miles away, on the campuses of Wilberforce and Central State, students will still walk cracked sidewalks. Professors will still work on contracts. Students will still withdraw for financial reasons.

Unless Ohio chooses to invest in the institutions that nurture and protect Black futures, those futures will continue to be harvested but never planted.

This is not just about football. It is about the future of Black Ohio. And whether our institutions will ever be allowed to rise beyond survival — and into sovereignty.

Disclaimer: This article was assisted by ChatGPT.