When the PWIs have a cold, then HBCUs have pneumonia. That common saying in African America is as true today as it has ever been and among HBCU endowments in 2022 it reverberated across the landscape. Of the top ten HBCUs that reported their endowments to NACUBO that only two out of ten showed a positive gain versus three out of ten showing positive gains among PWIs. The caveat there is the top PWI endowments are all operating with a minimum of $15 billion. An amount that ranges from six times the size of all HBCU top ten endowments combined and all the way up to twenty four times the size of the top ten HBCU endowments combined by UTIMCO, the managing entity of the Texas A&M and University of Texas endowments. UTIMCO is actually $10 billion larger than Harvard’s endowment. It poses an interesting lesson that many HBCUs should consider – merging their endowments and/or foundations for economic and capital scale capabilities. Virginia State University and Norfolk State University. Prairie View A&M University and Texas Southern University. A really aggressive strategy of course would be to have endowments at the conference level, but that will be an article for another time.
2022 was a down year in the markets which inevitably had an outsized negative impact on HBCU endowments who are less likely to be invested in venture capital, private equity, or other alternative investments that hedge against the volatility of the stock markets. HBCU endowments limited capital usually means limited investment options and those options tend to be heavily tied to public equity markets. It also did not help that just a few years removed from George Floyd’s death when HBCUs saw over thirty million dollar plus donations that in 2022, HBCUs only saw a whopping three while their PWI counterparts had fourteen donations over $100 million.
Without HBCUs capturing more than ten percent of the African American students going to college, then this struggle is likely to persist. Simply put, HBCUs need much larger alumni pools to even start to put a dent in the endowment gap long term.
The PWI-HBCU Endowment Gap for 2022 stands at $127.5 to $1, which is an increase from 2021’s $121.7 to $1.
*The change in market value does NOT represent the rate of return for the institution’s investments. Rather, the change in the market value of an endowment from FY21 to FY22 reflects the net impact of: 1) withdrawals to fund institutional operations and capital expenses; 2) the payment of endowment management and investment fees; 3) additions from donor gifts and other contributions; and 4) investment gains or losses.
SOURCE: NACUBO
Take a look at how an endowment works. Not only scholarships to reduce the student debt burden but research, recruiting talented faculty & students, faculty salaries, and a host of other things can be paid for through a strong endowment. It ultimately is the lifeblood of a college or university to ensure its success generation after generation.
We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope. – Martin Luther King, Jr.
Arguably, there are not enough donations in 2022 to even warrant an analysis but we are going to give it a try. The acute analysis is that HBCUs and alumni are going to have to prioritize creating wealthier alumni and using their alumni associations to leverage more aggressive investment vehicles which may otherwise be out of bounds for the institutions themselves. It also speaks to giving real thought to policies and strategy that can assist in that wealth creation. Reducing student loan debt loads, reducing time spent in maturation, increasing financial literacy requirements, and more need to be among serious conversation in order to help alumni get on the footing to wealth in both speed and probability. Years like this have been far too many in the midst of also battling underfunding by state and federal government. Not to mention the outright assault PWIs have launched in recent decades of trying to out HBCU HBCUs for African Americans and other minority groups. Of the three companies (pictured above) responsible for the wealth that allowed these individuals to give their Million Dollar Gifts – none were African American owned firms and their combined market caps were over $600 billion – an amount that is almost 40 percent of African America’s entire buying power. Something else that needs to be strongly considered in the wealth development conversation among alumni and administrations. Why are our alumni not creating more firms that can lead to transformative wealth and what can we do to assist?
Overall donations to all colleges and universities were down significantly in 2022 dropping under 300 Million Dollar Gifts given for the first time since 2010. This seems to be a fairly direct correlation to the economy and stock market’s rough 2022. Given that most wealthy donors have major investments tied to business ownership and investments and the Federal Reserve putting forth monetary policy in 2022 that many argued slammed the brakes on the stock market, it is no surprise that wealthy donors deemed themselves quite skittish. And per usual, when America/PWIs get a cold, then African America/HBCUs get pneumonia as seen by only 3 Million Dollar Gifts finding their way to HBCUs. None from HBCU alumni. The median donation was 2 to 1 in terms of donor value and the average donation was 4.5 to 1 in terms of donor value between PWI MDGs and HBCU MDGs. 2022 also provided the very first $1 billion donation to a college or university with Stanford University receiving a $1.1 billion pledge from John and Ann Doerr (both whom are Rice University alumnus).
This is a concerning trend going into uncertain financial times for the U.S. economy in particular. Colleges overall do tend to pick up more students during recessionary times with people losing jobs many see it as an opportunity to go to school or back to school. Unfortunately, tuition revenue is already too much of what HBCUs rely heavily upon and those new students are not likely in any position to give Million Dollar Gifts in the near future. HBCU philanthropy as it pertains to Million Dollar Gifts operates largely on a lottery like reality both relying on hope and depending on those outside of the culture and outside the alumni bases. With the changing sands of higher education shifting beneath our feet the resources to see tomorrow grow urgent with every passing day.
$1 Million Plus Donations To All Colleges: 275
$100 Million Plus Donations To All Colleges: 14
$1 Million Plus Donations Value To All Colleges: $7.1 Billion
$1 Million Plus Median Donation To All Colleges: $10.0 Million
$1 Million Plus Average Donation To All Colleges: $25.9 Million
$1 Million Plus Donations To HBCUs: 3
$100 Million Plus Donations To HBCUs: 0
$1 Million Plus Donations Value To HBCUs: $17.0 Million
$1 Million Plus Median Donation To HBCUs: $5.0 Million
$1 Million Plus Average Donation To HBCUs: $5.7 Million
HBCU Percentage of Donations To All Colleges: 1.1%
HBCU Percentage of Donation Value To All Colleges: 0.2%
1. Arthur M. Blank (pictured) – $10.0 million Recipient: Spelman College Source of Wealth: Home Depot
2. Reed Hastings & Patty Quillin – $5.0 million Recipient: Tougaloo College Source of Wealth: Media & Entertainment
3. Kenneth Chenault & Kathryn Chenault – $2.0 million Recipient: Howard University Source of Wealth: Education
If there was a short analysis of the 2021 HBCU endowment list it would be this – still not enough. Despite record breaking donations toward HBCUs from Mackenzie Scott and others in 2020-2021, the PWI-HBCU endowment gap among the Top 10 PWIs and HBCUs continues to balloon, a gap that stands at a staggering $121 to $1. This despite a 35 percent increase by the Top 10 HBCU endowments from last year. Simply put, winning the philanthropic “lottery” is not enough and it never will be when it comes to closing the endowment gap. The rabbit never beats the tortoise to put it another way. HBCUs must find a way to find consistent capital infusions over time as opposed to lighting quick one-offs.
The HBCU donor pool is simply too small and too poor (relatively speaking) to close the endowment gap. Without increasing the percentage of African Americans college students who go to HBCUs from 10 percent to 25-30 percent, it does not bode well for HBCUs to be able to close the endowment gap through traditional means. HBCUs and their alumni are going to have to be more creative and must be so expeditiously. While this is the most HBCU endowments we have ever reported with $100 million or greater, increasing from five in 2020 to seven in 2021, PWIs saw an 25 percent increase in the number of endowments over $2 billion going from 55 to 69 and an equally 25 percent rise in the number of endowments over $1 billion going from 114 to 142. This while HBCUs are still waiting for their first billion dollar endowment.
To that point, the race between Howard and Spelman is tightening. Last year’s $334 million lead that Howard held over Spelman has shrunk to $265 million. At one point it seemed a foregone conclusion that Howard would reach the milestone first (The Race To The First Billion Dollar HBCU Endowment: Can Anyone Catch Howard?), that is no longer the case. Howard’s public relations over the past year have not been favorable and while many people say all press is good press – not when you are an African American institution. With Hampton and North Carolina A&T’s departure from the MEAC, no HBCU conference (CIAA, GCAC, MEAC, SIAC, SWAC) is dominating the Top 10 and the list is split 50/50 between private and public HBCUs as well. Arguably this is the most diverse Top 10 HBCU endowment list since we first began publishing, but one thing remains feverishly consistent and that is there is a lot of work to be done to ensure HBCU endowments and therefore the institutions of HBCUs are sustainable and thriving.
*The change in market value does NOT represent the rate of return for the institution’s investments. Rather, the change in the market value of an endowment from FY20 to FY21 reflects the net impact of: 1) withdrawals to fund institutional operations and capital expenses; 2) the payment of endowment management and investment fees; 3) additions from donor gifts and other contributions; and 4) investment gains or losses.
SOURCE: NACUBO
Take a look at how an endowment works. Not only scholarships to reduce the student debt burden but research, recruiting talented faculty & students, faculty salaries, and a host of other things can be paid for through a strong endowment. It ultimately is the lifeblood of a college or university to ensure its success generation after generation.
Black people lived right by the railroad tracks, and the train would shake their houses at night. I would hear it as a boy, and I thought: I’m gonna make a song that sounds like that. – Little Richards
The individual, familial, community, and institutional wealth gaps between African America and all other groups continues to widen. Despite the consequential donations from Mackenzie Scott and Michael Bloomberg in 2020 to HBCUs it is simply not enough consistently and overwhelming enough to put out the fire. That fire being the HWCU-HBCU endowment gap, which is over $100 to $1 – and widening. Ironically, African America is often standing there with a water hose in their hand watching their house burn while waiting on their neighbor to bring a bucket of water over and help. Why do we say African America has the water hose? By HBCU Money estimates, African America’s tuition revenue value to all colleges is worth $60 billion annually – only $6 billion of that goes makes it way to HBCUs. There are 100 plus HBCUs, but only two have institutional banking relationships with African American owned banks. In other words, there are things that if we just looked inwardly there would be substantive change happening. Instead, we continue to wait for the “lottery” of other’s grace to befall upon us. And to that point, one of the greatest financial opportunities of our lifetime maybe falling upon us to use a resource within our institutions – our creativity.
It is no secret that African American creativity drives American culture. African American creativity has and is often exploited to the social and financial benefit of other groups. There maybe no greater example of that than hip-hop (and the music industry in general) where African American musicians created a genre of music that is now global in reach, but very little of it is actually owned by African Americans. Enter, the internet. Enter, NFTs. The internet is not flat nor is it democratized – after all even on the internet all of the mediums like Amazon, Facebook, Alphabet, Twitter, Square, etc. none are owned by African Americans. However, there is an increasing amount of decentralization that seems to be taking root in pockets of the World Wide Web where opportunities can be staked out. For instance, had an HBCU endowment in July 2011 purchased 5,000 bitcoins which at the time were $13.91 for a total of $69,550, then that HBCU today would have a value of $330 million today. To the best of our knowledge, there are no HBCUs holding bitcoin or any other cryptocurrencies in their portfolio. And while there is still plenty of time to add cryptocurrencies to the portfolio, there is also a new opportunity that one could easily argue is the equivalent of buying cryptocurrencies ten years ago. The NFT.
NFTs or non-fungible tokens are “Non-fungible” more or less means that it’s unique and can not be replaced with something else. For example, a bitcoin is fungible — trade one for another bitcoin, and you’ll have exactly the same thing. A one-of-a-kind trading card, however, is non-fungible. If you traded it for a different card, you’d have something completely different.”, says Mitchell Clark from The Verge. NFTs also work off the Ethereum blockchain, Ethereum being a cryptocurrency and blockchains are a digital distributed, decentralized, public ledger that exists across a network. So what can be a NFT? Again, Mitchell Clark from The Verge, “NFTs can really be anything digital (such as drawings, music, your brain downloaded and turned into an AI), but a lot of the current excitement is around using the tech to sell digital art.” NFTs are already showing their potential. A 14-year old girl made over $1 million from selling 8,000 NFTs according to Business Insider. The most expensive NFT sold to date went for $69 million at Christie’s. An amount that would still be greater than any donation ever given to an HBCU. Now imagine unlocking the creativity that exist on HBCU campuses with students, faculty, and staff.
This could ultimately be a win-win for everyone involved if setup properly. HBCUs can provide the space, hardware, infrastructure, and other support needed while students, faculty, and staff can provide the immense creative capital that we know. Unlocking African America creativity on campuses could quite literally means tens if not hundreds of billions into African American families, communities, and HBCUs. The incentive for HBCUs to invest in this infrastructure is simple. Financially more stable graduates, improved retention rates, potentially higher alumni donor rates, and a new stream of income for endowments.
Students could see themselves earning enough to reduce or eliminate student borrowing costs. An immense hinderance to HBCU graduates creating generational wealth for themselves and their family. This barrier to wealth also is something that it could be argued contributes to poor alumni donor giving at HBCUs. HBCU donations of significance often come from older HBCU alumni who tend to wait and give a large donation either at the end of life or through their estate once they have passed on. HBCU students on a whole as reflecting in HBCU Pell Grant numbers are coming from far more low-income backgrounds their PWI counterparts. Brookings reports that almost 60% of HBCU students expect $0 in family contributions (graph below) to their education as opposed to less than one-third for non-HBCU students. On the other end less than 6 percent of HBCU students expect their family to contribute at least $19,300 to their education versus over 20 percent of non-HBCU students. This means that despite HBCUs on average costing significantly less than their PWI counterparts, HBCU students are still more likely to graduate with student loan debt and significant student loan debt loads. The most recent HBCU Money report showing that 86 percent of HBCU graduates finish with debt and a median of over $34,000 in student loan debt versus 40 percent and $24,000 in student loan debt for those coming from Top 50 endowed colleges and universities.
For HBCUs, the previous mentioned is great for their long-term sustainability, but in this case there is a huge financial reward to be had by HBCU endowments today. By providing the infrastructure, helping ensure the intellectual property rights, and more – HBCUs can create financial partnerships with students, faculty, and staff. This means that in the same way there is NIL (name, image, likeness) happening in collegiate sports, HBCUs too could use these partnerships as a means to recruit more African American faculty who often cringe at the pay rates at HBCUs. It also means that if a student, faculty, or staff produces an NFT for example that sells for $100,000, then potentially on a 50-50 split that the HBCU’s endowment just increased by $50,000. There is also the opportunity to have a foray into the entrepreneurship that is already taking root in the NFT as well as the supporting properties that will support it as an industry and asset class. As we mentioned, intellectual property attorneys in this new age will become even more valuable. There are currently six HBCU law schools who could create a focus on both IP and on digital IP in particular and those schools would be rewarded handsomely by being at the forefront of the curve. Simply put, there is just too much opportunity and money that has yet to even scratch the surface of value for HBCUs to not get involved in NFTs.
The acute importance of closing the endowment gap must be at the forefront of HBCU alumni conversations if our institutions are to be sustained into the next Millenia. It must be if we are to take serious the closing of the individual and institutional wealth gaps for African America. More importantly if HBCUs are to move beyond simply surviving and into empowered institutions that are truly able to serve the social, economic, and political interest of African America and the Diaspora, then having the institutional wealth and endowments necessary to do so is paramount. Climbing this mountain will be no easy task, but we can simply look at the wealth that has been created by our labor and our creativity as an enduring possibility of possibility. This time we must be the ownership of that creativity and protect its ownership at all costs.
For the first time since we began reporting the Top Ten HBCU endowments, an HBCU endowment that we knew should be present but was not reporting is now present – Morehouse College. Hopefully next year we will see Tuskegee University join the fray. This provides a far more accurate picture of the HBCU endowment picture, at least at the top. While many will wonder why the endowments do not appear larger after massive donations that happen in 2020, it should be understood that many donations will not be reflective in the institutions endowment figures until fiscal year 2021 is reported so expect to see massive jumps for many HBCUs in the next calendar year.
However, examining the HBCU endowment world prior Mackenzie Scott’s 2020 philanthropy shows Howard University powering ahead toward becoming the first HBCU endowment to $1 billion. Their lead over number two Spelman extended from $302 million in 2019 to $355 million in 2020. Unfortunately, only four of the ten HBCU endowments saw increases in their endowment market value, while amongst the PWI’s Top Ten endowments all ten saw increases in their market value.* The Top Ten PWI endowments for 2020 combined for $199.8 billion versus $2 billion for the Top Ten HBCU endowments showing an institutional wealth gap of almost $100 to $1.
There is going to be a continued mixed bag of endowment reality among HBCUs. The Have and Have Nots among HBCU endowments has exacerbated and despite the attention during 2020 most smaller HBCUs have yet to secure donations that would secure their future. Even many of those who did are still sitting in a precarious perch. The NACUBO average endowment is over $907 million, an amount that is almost five times the average HBCU endowment and an average that not even Howard has reached yet. This means that while the “lottery” donations from non-HBCU sources is great, it absolutely does not remove the charge from HBCU alumni of being vigilant givers to their institutions. If HBCUs could simply get more of their alumni giving small amounts on a consistent basis that would do wonders for improving endowments. It goes without saying the other reality is that all HBCUs need to increase their student populations so that they are graduating more alumni and therefore more potential donors.
*The change in market value does NOT represent the rate of return for the institution’s investments. Rather, the change in the market value of an endowment from FY19 to FY20 reflects the net impact of: 1) withdrawals to fund institutional operations and capital expenses; 2) the payment of endowment management and investment fees; 3) additions from donor gifts and other contributions; and 4) investment gains or losses.
SOURCE: NACUBO
Take a look at how an endowment works. Not only scholarships to reduce the student debt burden but research, recruiting talented faculty & students, faculty salaries, and a host of other things can be paid for through a strong endowment. It ultimately is the lifeblood of a college or university to ensure its success generation after generation.
HBCU Money 