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The HBCU Card? Why the Community’s Institutional Dollar Constantly Fails to Circulate at the HBCU’s Front Door

Posted on June 7, 2026 by hbcumoney | Leave a comment

Let us put our money together; let us use our money; let us put our money out at usury among ourselves, and reap the benefit ourselves. – Maggie Lena Walker

The HBCU Card routes HBCU community spending through a family-owned Minnesota bank. African American-owned financial institutions are watching from the sideline. HBCUs are institutions with balance sheets, alumni networks, and banking relationships. When those relationships run through a family-owned bank in St. Paul, Minnesota, the question is not whether the partnership is well-intentioned. The question is who is building institutional capacity for whom.

There is an old arrangement, familiar to the sharecropping South, called the company store. The employer owned the land, controlled the wages, and operated the only store within reach. The worker labored, earned, and spent and every dollar completed a circle that ended back in the employer’s pocket. The arrangement was not presented as exploitation. It was presented as convenience. As service. As the reasonable way things worked given the options available. The options, of course, were controlled by the same party that ran the store. HBCUs in 2026 are not sharecroppers. They are institutions with endowments, alumni networks, and balance sheets. Which makes it harder, not easier, to explain why they are running the company store model on their own communities.

A prepaid Mastercard called the HBCU Card is circulating in HBCU communities, issued through Sunrise Banks, N.A., a family-owned bank headquartered in St. Paul, Minnesota. It carries the logos of individual HBCUs. It returns a fraction of transaction fees to participating schools. The pitch is that HBCU students and alumni can express institutional pride through their spending and send a little money back to their alma mater in the process. That is the whole proposal. Read it twice if you need to.

It is not alignment. It is a licensing agreement dressed up as solidarity.

Sunrise Banks is a privately held, family-owned institution headquartered in St. Paul, Minnesota, wholly owned by University Financial Corp, GBC, led by CEO David Reiling and his father, Bill Reiling. The bank is a certified B Corporation and holds CDFI designation from the U.S. Treasury. Its social impact commitments are real. None of that is the point. Sunrise Banks is not an African American-owned institution. It has no ownership ties to the HBCU community. It is not part of the African American financial ecosystem in any structural sense. It is a vendor that found a distribution channel, and the distribution channel said yes. Banking is not a transaction. It is infrastructure. Deposits flow into balance sheets that fund mortgages, small business loans, and community reinvestment. When that capital is held by institutions with ownership accountability to the depositing community, it compounds within that ecosystem. When it flows to an outside institution, however well-certified, however socially conscious its marketing, it leaves. A branded card does not change the direction of the outflow. Pride does not reroute capital. Ownership does.

HBCUs are, by their founding logic, in the business of building something that lasts. Endowments. Land. Research infrastructure. Alumni networks that compound across generations. That is the institutional premise. Against that premise, the HBCU Card is an embarrassment. It asks HBCU communities to generate transaction fee revenue, a rounding error in any serious capital strategy — and hand the actual value of the arrangement to a Minnesota family bank. The HBCU gets logo placement. Sunrise Banks gets a branded distribution network across dozens of historically Black institutions, customer acquisition at scale, and the reputational association with one of African America’s most symbolically resonant set of institutions. That is not a partnership. That is a concession. This would be forgivable if there were no alternative. There is. There are 221 of them.

As of 2025, there are 205 active African American-owned credit unions holding more than $8.15 billion in assets and serving nearly 727,000 members across 29 states and the District of Columbia. There are 16 African American-owned banks holding $6.7 billion in combined assets. Louisiana alone has 25 African American-owned credit unions. Illinois has 23. Virginia has 13. These institutions are not obscure. They are documented, chartered, federally insured, and in many cases operating within miles of HBCU campuses. Six HBCU-affiliated credit unions, institutions built specifically to serve the campus financial community, are still active after five such institutions closed or were absorbed since 2020. Their combined assets total $76.8 million. They are contracting. The HBCU Card is expanding. This is the choice being made.

The six that remain deserve to be named because the institutions they were built to serve have apparently forgotten them. Southern Teachers & Parents Federal Credit Union, founded to serve the Southern University system across its Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and Shreveport campuses, is the largest of the survivors at $30.3 million in assets. Florida A&M University Federal Credit Union serves the flagship public HBCU in Florida. Virginia State University Federal Credit Union serves one of Virginia’s historically Black institutions. Councill Federal Credit Union serves the Alabama A&M University community. Arkansas A&M College Federal Credit Union serves the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff. Xavier University of Louisiana Federal Credit Union serves the only historically Black Catholic university in the Western Hemisphere. These six institutions held a combined $76.8 million in assets as of the most recent reporting, a number that should be ten times larger given the campus communities they sit inside. Prairie View A&M University Federal Credit Union, founded in 1937 by sixteen people who built a financial institution to serve the employees of Texas’s first state-supported college for African Americans, did not survive. It was absorbed by Cy-Fair Federal Credit Union, the credit union of a Houston-area school district with a documented record of racial inequity in its own student discipline. An 85-year-old Black institution, built by and for a Black university community, became a subsidiary of a school district credit union. Prairie View A&M University has nothing publicly to say about it. These institutions are not disappearing because they failed their communities. They are disappearing because their communities’ own flagship institutions will not anchor them.

The scale of what coordinated HBCU engagement could mean to this sector is not theoretical. The median African American-owned credit union holds approximately $2.47 million in assets and serves roughly 618 members, operating at the margin of viability in an asset tier where the national system is contracting fastest. Only 40 percent have a functional public website. Thirty percent are congregation-affiliated, with succession risks that threaten their continuity across a single pastoral transition. These institutions are not failing for lack of purpose. They are failing for lack of the institutional anchor relationships that would capitalize and stabilize them. HBCUs are precisely that anchor. A single mid-sized HBCU redirecting its payroll processing and student financial services to an African American-owned financial institution is a capitalization event for that institution. Six HBCUs doing it in a coordinated way reshape a sector. Instead, the sector contracts and HBCUs sign prepaid card deals.

The HBCU Card requires nothing from the institution except a logo. There is no governance, no balance sheet commitment, no strategic partnership to build or manage. An administrator with a full calendar can execute it in an afternoon. That is the real explanation, and it is worth saying plainly: this is what institutional avoidance looks like when it has been dressed up with branding. Banking with an African American-owned institution requires relationships to be built, terms to be negotiated, and sometimes real advocacy inside a bureaucracy that defaults to the path of least resistance. It is harder. It is supposed to be harder. Institutions that will not do the harder work in service of their own community’s financial ecosystem are not being strategic. They are being comfortable.

The Jewish American institutional ecosystem did not build generational financial infrastructure by licensing its brand to well-intentioned outside vendors. It built banks. It built credit unions. It built investment vehicles and directed capital toward them, institution by institution, decade by decade. Cuban American financial infrastructure in South Florida did not emerge from branded prepaid cards issued by Anglo-owned banks. It emerged from institutional discipline from the deliberate decision to route deposits, payroll, and investment relationships toward institutions owned by the community they were meant to serve. African American institutions are capable of the same discipline. The question that must be asked plainly, at this point, is whether they intend to practice it.

Sunrise Banks will receive a branded distribution network across the HBCU ecosystem, customer acquisition at scale, and the reputational weight of an association with institutions that African America has defended, funded, and attended for over 150 years. HBCUs will receive a transaction fee drip. That is the deal, and anyone who has read a term sheet in their life can see which side of it they want to be on. The deeper insult is that the card’s central premise that cultural identity can be expressed through a branded payment instrument is not wrong. OneUnited Bank, one of the largest African American-owned bank in the country with $756 million in assets, already offers a full range of culturally branded debit card designs as part of its standard deposit product. The infrastructure to do this through a Black-owned bank already exists. HBCUs have simply chosen not to direct their communities toward it.

The alternative does not require building anything new. It requires redirecting what already moves. Payroll. Student fee processing. Operating accounts. Auxiliary enterprise banking. These are cash flows that exist at every HBCU right now, today, flowing through institutions with no ownership accountability to the African American community. Fort Valley State University in Georgia operates with Citizens Trust Bank and Carver State Bank in the same state. Edward Waters University in Jacksonville, Florida sits in a market with documented African American-owned financial institution presence. Bethune-Cookman University and Florida Memorial University operate in a Florida context where redirecting institutional banking relationships would register immediately and materially in the balance sheets of the African American-owned credit unions that are currently fighting to survive. None of this requires a capital campaign. It requires a decision.

Delaware State University sits in proximity to one of the most financially sophisticated African American communities on the East Coast and banks with institutions that have no structural accountability to that community. Cheyney University, the oldest HBCU in the country, founded in 1837, older than the Civil War, operates in Pennsylvania, a state with documented African American-owned financial institutions, without a formal banking relationship with a single one of them. These are not resource constraints. These are not governance complications. These are choices. Call them what they are.

This is not an indictment of Sunrise Banks. The Reiling family built a legitimate community development institution and its credentials are real. But good intentions held by people outside a community are not a substitute for ownership infrastructure inside it and this distinction should not have to be explained to the leadership of institutions that exist precisely because the African American community refused to accept the benevolence of outside institutions as a substitute for their own. The HBCU was the answer to that substitution. The HBCU Card reverses the logic entirely.

The pattern is not new and it is not subtle. African American institutions accept the role of distribution channel, brand partner, and program host for arrangements that deliver the primary economic value to someone else. The community benefit is always in the framing. It is often partially real. What it never builds is the ownership infrastructure that makes a community institutionally durable across generations. HBCU Money has documented this in research pipelines that route HBCU-generated intellectual capital into PWI commercialization structures. In philanthropic arrangements that deliver program dollars without governance rights. In workforce development partnerships that build human capital for employers with no reciprocal obligation to the communities supplying the talent. The HBCU Card is the same transaction in a different category. The African American community keeps accepting these terms. Its institutions keep modeling the acceptance. And then everyone wonders why the ecosystem does not compound.

HBCUs are not passive observers of the African American financial ecosystem. They are, or should be, its institutional anchors. A single HBCU redirecting its payroll, student financial services, and auxiliary enterprise banking to African American-owned institutions is a capitalization event for those institutions. Six doing it in coordination reshape the sector’s asset base. Twenty doing it is a structural transformation of African American financial infrastructure that no amount of philanthropic giving or federal grant-making has ever achieved. That is what is being traded away for transaction fee revenue from a prepaid card. Let that land.

The 205 African American-owned credit unions and 16 African American-owned banks — Liberty Bank and Trust, Citizens Trust Bank, Mechanics and Farmers Bank, Optus Bank, Industrial Bank, First Independence Bank, and the rest — are not waiting to be discovered. They are chartered, capitalized, and operational. They have been there. What they have not had is the institutional anchor relationships that HBCUs are positioned to provide and have repeatedly declined to provide. That is the record. It is not ambiguous.

The HBCU Card will keep finding takers. The path of least institutional resistance always does. What it will not build, what it cannot build, is the African American financial ecosystem that 150 years of HBCU existence should by now have helped to anchor. That ecosystem is being built, slowly and against the current, by institutions that have received none of the loyalty that their community’s flagship universities should be directing toward them. HBCUs were founded as an act of defiance against a system that refused to invest in Black institutional capacity. The HBCU Card is an act of surrender to the same logic, branded in school colors.

African America knows the statistic. It has been recited at every convocation, posted on every community Facebook page, cited in every financial literacy workshop for the last thirty years: a dollar circulates in the Jewish American community for an estimated 20 days, in Asian American communities for roughly 28 days, and exits the African American community in less than 6 hours. The room nods. The speaker moves on. And then the HBCU signs a deal with Sunrise Banks. This is the part that should produce institutional shame and does not. The circulation of the Black dollar has become African America’s most repeated and least practiced idea. It functions as a ritual, spoken to affirm shared values, set aside before the next institutional decision is made. And the institutional decisions are where the actual economy is built or surrendered. HBCUs are supposed to be different. They are the institutions African America built when it was not allowed to build them. They carry that founding act in their names. They commemorate it at every homecoming. And then Alabama State University hands a $125 million investment management contract to a European American-owned firm without a public accounting of whether a single African American-owned asset manager was seriously considered. And Howard University puts PNC’s name on a center for entrepreneurship. And HBCU after HBCU runs its student financial services through Wells Fargo or Bank of America while Liberty Bank, Citizens Trust, and Mechanics and Farmers Bank operate in the same states, serve the same communities, and wait for a relationship that does not come. “Buy Black” is the slogan. The institutional behavior is: accept the proposal from whoever shows up with the most polished deck. This cannot be fixed at the household level. Individual people buying Black cannot compensate for institutions that do not. When HBCUs alongside fraternities, sororities, churches, and every other pillar of African American institutional life model the extraction rather than the retention, the community internalizes the lesson being taught, not the slogan being chanted. The HBCU Card is not an isolated mistake. It is a current example of a durable institutional posture: perform solidarity, outsource the economics.

Disclaimer: This article was assisted by ClaudeAI.

The Africa Travel Ban Is an HBCU Problem

Posted on April 12, 2026 by hbcumoney | Leave a comment

Africans in the United States must remember that the slave ships brought no West Indians, no Caribbeans, no Jamaicans or Trinidadians or Barbadians to this hemisphere. The slave ships brought only African people and most of us took the semblance of nationality from the places where slave ships dropped us off. – Dr. John H. Clarke

The photograph of Majok Bior, a South Sudanese computer science sophomore at Duke University, stranded at his cousin’s home in Kampala after the Trump administration’s travel restrictions invalidated his visa — has circulated widely as a symbol of individual suffering. And it is that. But to read it only through the lens of personal tragedy is to miss the structural dimensions of what is unfolding across American higher education, and to miss, in particular, what this moment means for HBCUs.

The Trump administration’s travel ban, initially signed on June 4, 2025, targeted 12 countries and placed partial restrictions on seven more, covering a geography concentrated in Africa and the Middle East. By December 2025, that list had expanded to 39 countries and territories, with Nigeria, historically one of the top ten sources of international students in the United States, placed under partial restrictions effective January 1, 2026. Individuals in Nigeria will not be able to receive student visas beginning January 1. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has signaled further expansion, with a State Department memo identifying 36 additional countries for potential restriction, including 25 African nations as well as countries in the Caribbean, Central Asia, and the Pacific Islands. If that expansion proceeds, the policy will have effectively severed the institutional connection between American higher education and the African continent.

For HBCUs specifically, this is not a distant geopolitical event. It is a direct threat to an enrollment strategy, a revenue base, and a civilizational relationship that institutions have spent decades building.

To understand the financial stakes, one must first understand how international student enrollment became integral to the fiscal architecture of many HBCUs. In addition to the tuition money international students often bring, many foreign students pay the full sticker price, often aided by their home countries’ governments there are benefits for HBCUs’ American students as well. International students, particularly those arriving with government-funded scholarships from Nigeria, Ghana, Saudi Arabia, and other nations, have served as a reliable source of full-fare tuition revenue at institutions that chronically lack the endowment depth to absorb enrollment volatility.

Among HBCUs with ten or more international students, Morgan State had the most as of the 2017-18 academic year, with 945 students; Howard was second with 920; and Tennessee State third with 584, according to the Institute of International Education. These numbers have only grown. Tennessee State, for instance, went from 77 international undergraduate students in 2008-09 to 549 by fall 2016 representing roughly 8 percent of its undergraduate student body. Across the sector, African students from Nigeria and Ghana historically constituted a significant share of that international cohort.

The financial logic was sound. A university with modest endowment holdings and only one HBCU, Howard University, currently holds an endowment exceeding $1 billion, cannot easily absorb the loss of a tuition-paying population without triggering cascading institutional consequences. When full-fare international students leave an enrollment ledger, the institution must either raise tuition on domestic students who are often already Pell Grant-eligible, draw down reserves, reduce staffing, or curtail academic programs. In a sector where financial fragility is not the exception but the norm, any of those choices carries compounding institutional risk. Preliminary projections by NAFSA and international education research partner JB International predict a 30 to 40 percent decline in new international student enrollment, leading to a 15 percent decline in overall enrollment this fall and loss of $7 billion within local economies and more than 60,000 jobs. That system-wide figure masks the disproportionate exposure at institutions whose international student populations are concentrated in African countries now under restriction.

The financial dimension, however, is only the first tier of the problem. The more consequential loss may be strategic: the slow dismantling of an institutional relationship between HBCUs and Africa that has been a defining feature of both parties’ long-term development. For decades, HBCU campuses have served as one of the primary entry points for African students seeking American credentials and professional networks. The relationship has never been purely transactional. It has been civilizational, rooted in a shared recognition that the institutional capacity of the African diaspora, on both sides of the Atlantic, depends on the training and circulation of its most capable people. Howard University, Morgan State, Florida A&M, and Tennessee State have all cultivated significant African student communities that returned home as engineers, physicians, lawyers, economists, and public administrators, seeding institutions across the continent with HBCU-educated professionals.

That pipeline is now interrupted. Majok Bior is one face of the disruption. He is also, statistically, the kind of student, a full-scholarship computer science talent, whose skills and networks would have contributed meaningfully to either the American or the African institutional ecosystem over the subsequent decades. The State Department’s position is unambiguous. There is no appeals window, no informal pathway, no consular discretion available to students like Bior whose visas were invalidated mid-enrollment. The pipeline does not merely slow. It stops.

The administration has signaled it may further target sub-Saharan Africa for future travel bans. Twenty-four of the 36 countries identified as future ban candidates are in sub-Saharan Africa. If all 24 were to be hit with bans, an additional 71 percent of the region’s population would be affected. At that scale, the policy would not merely interrupt an enrollment channel. It would functionally close the institutional bridge between American HBCUs and the African continent.

The arrivals data make the stakes concrete. The number of new and returning African students arriving in the United States for the 2025 fall semester fell by nearly a third from the previous year, according to preliminary Commerce Department data. Arrivals from Nigeria and Ghana, which historically send more students to the United States than any other African countries, dropped by roughly half. Those are not marginal declines. They represent a structural break in the flow of talent that has sustained both HBCU campuses and the professional networks those campuses anchor.

The broader context amplifies the damage. HBCUs have been managing a long-running tension between their mission to serve African American students and the enrollment arithmetic that increasingly pushes them toward diversification. Black student enrollment at HBCUs increased by just 15 percent from 1976 to 2022, while enrollment of students from other racial and ethnic groups rose by a staggering 117 percent during the same period. Within that context, African international students have occupied an important, if underappreciated, position: they are enrolled students who are Black, who arrive often with external funding, and who align with the cultural mission of the institution in ways that students from other international communities do not. The loss of this population does not merely reduce headcount. It removes a category of student whose presence reinforces the intellectual and cultural identity of HBCU campuses while simultaneously contributing to their revenue base.

HBCU leaders should resist the temptation to treat the current moment as a policy problem requiring a policy solution that is, to wait for a change in administration or a favorable court ruling before taking action. The institutional response must be proactive, and it must be organized at the sector level rather than institution by institution.

The first imperative is legal and advocacy coordination. HBCUs should be visible participants in the coalition of higher education institutions pushing back against travel ban expansion. The legal challenges already filed by some universities have produced limited court-ordered exceptions. HBCU presidents, through their associations and individually, possess a particular moral authority in this argument: these institutions were founded on the principle that the state should not determine who deserves access to education. That founding logic has direct application to the current moment, and its articulation should not be left to the advocacy organizations of predominantly white institutions alone.

The second is the construction of alternative enrollment infrastructure. Several countries whose students are not currently restricted represent significant untapped pipelines for HBCUs including Kenya, Ethiopia, South Africa, and several francophone West African nations not yet under full restriction. Morgan State’s international enrollment tripling between 2014 and 2017, driven by a concerted recruitment strategy, demonstrates that rapid scaling is possible when institutions make it a priority. The question now is whether that kind of deliberate enrollment strategy can be retargeted toward countries where the policy environment remains navigable.

The third imperative, and the most consequential for the long run, is the development of transnational academic infrastructure that does not depend on American visa policy at all and here the sector does not need to theorize. It already has a model. Claflin University, an HBCU in Orangeburg, South Carolina, and Africa University in Zimbabwe have together built and delivered a fully online Master of Science program in Biotechnology and Climate Change, producing their first cohort of graduates in 2025. The program requires no visa, no transatlantic relocation, and no dependence on the goodwill of a State Department consular officer. It delivers graduate-level credentials, anchored to an HBCU’s academic infrastructure, to scholars who remain embedded in the African communities they will eventually serve. That is not a symbolic gesture. It is a replicable institutional architecture — one that severs the link between American immigration policy and the HBCU-Africa educational relationship at precisely the point where that link has proven most vulnerable. The disciplines selected are themselves strategic: biotechnology and climate change are among the fields where African scholars have the most urgent applied work to do, and where the absence of well-trained researchers carries the steepest institutional cost. What Claflin and Africa University have built is a proof of concept for the entire sector. Howard, Morgan State, Florida A&M, and Tennessee State, institutions that have already invested in African student pipelines and cultivated international enrollment are positioned to extend this model into additional disciplines, additional partner institutions, and additional countries. Students who were considering coming in 2026 will be discouraged and will be looking to other destinations, as one international education expert has observed. If those students go elsewhere, HBCUs should be competing to ensure that some of that “elsewhere” is a degree program bearing an HBCU’s name, delivered on African soil, through African partner institutions, and impervious to the policy preferences of any particular American administration.

The image of Majok Bior waiting in Kampala is a human document. But it is also an institutional document. It records the moment when an African student who had successfully navigated the American credentialing system, who had won a full scholarship, enrolled in computer science, played intramural soccer, and survived chemistry class was extracted from that system not by any failure of his own but by a federal policy aimed at restricting the movement of African people into American institutions. HBCUs were built precisely because such exclusions were once the default condition of American higher education. The institutional memory of that history is not a rhetorical resource. It is a strategic asset, a basis for understanding that the institutions which serve communities without consistent access to political protection must always be building structures that can survive the withdrawal of that protection. The Africa travel ban is an HBCU problem. The sector’s response to it will reveal something important about whether these institutions have developed the depth and coordination to meet a challenge that is, in its essential structure, the same challenge they were built to confront.

Disclaimer: This article was assisted by ClaudeAI.

When Big Gifts Cast Long Shadows: Why HBCUs Blessed by MacKenzie Scott Must Invest in the HBCUs and African American Institutions Still Left Behind

Posted on December 26, 2025 by hbcumoney | 1 comment

“Power grows when it circulates. If only one HBCU rises, none of us truly rise.”

MacKenzie Scott’s philanthropy has reshaped the HBCU landscape in ways that few could have imagined a decade ago. When her unrestricted gifts began landing across the sector, they offered something rare in Black institutional life: immediate liquidity, strategic freedom, and the assumption that HBCUs knew best how to use the capital given to them. Institutions like Prairie View A&M, Tuskegee, Winston-Salem State, Spelman, Morgan State, and others seized this moment to strengthen balance sheets, expand programs, retire debt, and set in motion long-term visions often delayed by years of underfunding.

But while headlines celebrated these historic gifts, another truth ran quietly beneath the surface many of the smallest, oldest, and most financially fragile HBCUs received nothing. Texas College, Voorhees, Morris, short-funded religiously affiliated colleges, and two-year HBCUs were notably absent from the list. Their exclusion was not due to a lack of mission, quality, or need. It was due to visibility, a structural inequality baked into the philanthropic landscape.

Large and mid-sized HBCUs possess communications offices, audited financial statements, national reputations, and alumni networks large enough to keep their names in circulation. Small HBCUs often have one person doing the work of an entire department, no national brand presence, and no full-time staff dedicated to donor engagement. Philanthropy at scale tends to flow to institutions already “discoverable,” which means the colleges that need the money most are often the least visible to donors like Scott. This is not a critique of her giving; she has done more for HBCUs than any private donor in a generation. Where the African American donors of consequence is a another article for another day. It is an indictment of a philanthropic system that confuses visibility with worthiness.

Unrestricted capital, however, changes power dynamics. When an HBCU receives $20 million, $40 million, or $50 million with no strings attached, it is receiving not just money but institutional autonomy. It is gaining the ability to build, to plan, to hire, to innovate, and to settle the long-deferred obligations that drain mission-driven organizations. This autonomy carries with it an important question: what responsibility does an HBCU have to the larger ecosystem when it receives this kind of power?

HBCUs often describe themselves as part of a shared lineage, a collective built from necessity and sustained by interdependence. If that is true, then institutions that receive transformative gifts have a responsibility to circulate a portion of that capital to the HBCUs that remain structurally invisible. This is not a matter of charity; it is a matter of ecosystem logic. A rising tide only lifts all boats if every institution has a boat capable of floating.

Even a small redistribution—2 to 5 percent of unrestricted gifts—would represent a meaningful shift. A $50 million gift becomes a $1–2.5 million contribution to a collective pool. A $20 million gift becomes $400,000–$1 million. A $5 million gift becomes $100,000–$250,000. Spread across the dozens of HBCUs that received Scott’s funds, such a strategy could generate $40–60 million in shared capital almost immediately. For a small HBCU with a $12 million budget, even a $500,000 infusion can stabilize operations, hire essential staff, or stave off accreditation risks. And for two-year HBCUs—critical institutions that often serve first-generation and working-class students—$250,000 can transform workforce programs or upgrade classroom technology.

When unrestricted money flows into the ecosystem, it should not be seen as belonging solely to the institution receiving it. It should be viewed as a rare chance to strengthen the entire system that sustains Black educational capacity. That means revisiting the historic practices of resource sharing that once defined HBCUs. There was a time when faculty were exchanged, when larger institutions lent administrators to smaller ones, and when collective survival was at the center of institutional strategy. Financial scarcity eroded much of that ethos over time; unrestricted capital can revive it.

The need for this kind of intra-HBCU investment becomes even more urgent when we consider how philanthropy shapes public perception. When a small HBCU faces financial distress, politicians and media often use its weakness as a reason to question the entire sector. But when a small HBCU strengthens, expands, and stabilizes, it lifts the credibility of the collective. The fate of one HBCU inevitably influences the political and philanthropic fortunes of the others. Strengthening the weakest institutions is not optional it is a strategic imperative for the strongest ones.

Shared capital also opens the door to new structures that benefit the entire ecosystem. Larger HBCUs could help create a visibility accelerator that provides grant-writing support, marketing expertise, budgeting assistance, and donor engagement tools for smaller institutions. They could establish a joint endowment fund where smaller HBCUs gain access to investment managers they could never otherwise afford. They could create emergency liquidity pools to help institutions weather short-term cash shortages that often cascade into long-term crises. They could co-sponsor research initiatives, faculty exchanges, and new academic programs at institutions that have the vision but lack the staff or funding to execute.

These are not theoretical ideas; they are practices used by well-resourced universities and nonprofit networks across the country. Major universities routinely fund pipeline schools, partner institutions, and community colleges. Corporations build up their suppliers. Regional governments pool funding to strengthen smaller municipalities. In almost every sector except the HBCU sector, power is used to build the ecosystem, not just the institution.

One of the most overlooked consequences of Scott’s gifts is the cultural message they send: large HBCUs are now in a position to move beyond survival mode and into builder mode. They can start thinking not just about their own campuses but about the health of the entire HBCU network. They have the resources to help smaller institutions become discoverable to future donors, to strengthen donor reporting infrastructure, to modernize back offices, and to raise their visibility in national conversations.

Redistribution is not about guilt. It is not about moral obligation. It is about strategic logic. Large HBCUs cannot thrive in a sector where small HBCUs collapse. For the ecosystem to have political leverage, credibility in national policy debates, and a future pipeline of Black scholars and professionals, the entire network must be strong. When an HBCU closes or falters, opponents of Black institutional development use that failure as proof of irrelevance. When an HBCU grows even a small one it becomes a success story that benefits the whole landscape.

The Scott gifts represent a once-in-a-generation financial turning point, but they are only a starting point. If HBCUs treat them as isolated blessings, the impact will be uneven and short-lived. If they treat them as seed capital for an ecosystem-wide transformation, the impact could reshape Black educational power for decades. Large HBCUs must decide whether they will be institutions that simply grow or institutions that help the entire sector evolve.

Smaller HBCUs cannot increase visibility alone. They cannot hire full development teams or produce 50-page donor reports without capital. They cannot expand new programs without bridge funding. They cannot modernize their infrastructure without partners. But the HBCUs that did receive unrestricted capital can change the landscape for them and by doing so, they strengthen the entire ecosystem.

This moment is not just about money. It is about whether HBCUs will use new wealth to reproduce old hierarchies or to build new pathways for collective power. In a philanthropic world that rewards visibility, the institutions that already stand in the light now have the responsibility and the means to illuminate the rest.

The measure of true power within the HBCU ecosystem is not what one institution accumulates. It is what the ecosystem can create together what none of its institutions could build alone. The future of HBCU philanthropy will depend on whether those blessed with unrestricted gifts choose to expand their own shadows or choose instead to cast light.

Disclaimer: This article was assisted by ChatGPT.

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Tagged Black institutional wealth, HBCU collaboration, HBCU donor engagement, HBCU ecosystem, hbcu endowments, hbcu financial strategy, hbcu philanthropy, HBCU resource sharing, HBCU visibility gap, MacKenzie Scott donations, miles college, morris brown college, philanthropic equity, small HBCU funding, texas college, underfunded HBCUs, unrestricted gifts

A Merger of (Potential) Might: Why Prairie View A&M and Texas Southern Should Combine Their Foundations to Challenge the Endowment Establishment

Posted on September 1, 2025 by hbcumoney | Leave a comment

It is reason, and not passion, which must guide our deliberations, guide our debate, and guide our decision. – Barbara Jordan

In the gilded halls of America’s elite universities, financial firepower is both a symbol and source of dominance. Endowments—the great silent engines of academia—determine not only which students get scholarships but which schools can recruit Nobel-calibre faculty, fund original research, and shape public policy. At the apex of this order stands UTIMCO, the University of Texas and Texas A&M’s investment juggernaut, with more than $70 billion under management. Below, far below, exist the undercapitalised yet ambitious Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) of Texas.

Two of the state’s largest HBCUs—Prairie View A&M University (PVAMU) and Texas Southern University (TSU)—have long histories, loyal alumni, and vital missions. What they do not have is institutional wealth. PVAMU’s foundation reported a modest $1.83 million in net assets in 2022. TSU’s foundation, better capitalised, holds $22.7 million. Combined, that amounts to just $24.5 million. For comparison, Rice University, less than 50 miles from either campus, holds an endowment north of $7.8 billion.

That yawning disparity matters. But it also presents an opportunity: a merger of the two foundations into a single, more potent philanthropic and investment entity. Done properly, it could reorient how Black higher education competes—not by appealing to fairness or guilt, but through scale, strategy, and institutional force.

A Rebalancing Act

To understand the potential of a PVAMU-TSU foundation merger, one must first grasp the dynamics of university endowments. Large endowments benefit from economies of scale, granting them access to exclusive investment opportunities—private equity, venture capital, hedge funds—often unavailable to smaller players. They attract the best fund managers, demand lower fees, and can weather market volatility without compromising their missions. Small foundations, by contrast, tend to be conservatively invested, costly to manage per dollar, and too fragmented to punch above their weight.

A consolidated HBCU foundation in Texas would be small compared to UTIMCO, but large relative to its peers. With a $25 million corpus as a starting point, the new entity could position itself for growth by professionalising its investment strategy, adopting a more ambitious donor engagement plan, and forming partnerships with Black-owned banks, family offices, and community institutions. Call it the Texas Black Excellence Fund, or perhaps, more simply, the TexHBCU Endowment.

To be sure, the legal and logistical barriers to such a merger are real. Foundation boards guard their autonomy jealously. Alumni pride can turn parochial. Governance models would need careful negotiation to ensure representation and avoid turf wars. But the arguments in favour are compelling.

The Power of One

First, a merger would cut overhead. Legal, accounting, auditing, and compliance costs—duplicated today—could be streamlined. A joint fundraising apparatus could create a single point of entry for corporate partners and high-net-worth donors. Branding efforts would gain coherence: instead of competing for attention, the institutions would stand together as a symbol of Black institutional unity and strength.

Second, scale invites leverage. A $25 million foundation cannot change the world overnight, but it can attract co-investments, engage in pooled funds, and perhaps even launch a purpose-driven asset management firm in the model of UTIMCO. If successful, this would be the first Black-led institutional investor of serious size in Texas—capable not only of managing endowment funds but of influencing broader economic flows across Black Texas.

Third, the merger would send a strategic signal to policymakers and philanthropic networks. It would say, in effect: “We are no longer asking for permission to grow. We are building the engine ourselves.” That tone matters. Too often, HBCUs are framed as needing rescue. A merged foundation flips that narrative. It becomes an asset allocator, a market participant, a builder of capital rather than a petitioner of it.

UTIMCO: A Goliath in the Crosshairs?

No one expects a $25 million fund to challenge a $70 billion behemoth. But that is not the point. UTIMCO’s dominance is as much political as it is financial. Its influence flows from its role as gatekeeper to resources, shaping everything from campus architecture to graduate fellowships. The merged HBCU foundation would not dethrone UTIMCO—it would decentralise power by becoming a second pole.

Indeed, the comparison may inspire mimicry. Just as UTIMCO serves multiple institutions, so too could a joint HBCU foundation. Prairie View and Texas Southern are only the beginning. Over time, the model could scale to include other Black-serving institutions across Texas and the South. This would amplify investment impact and accelerate institutional wealth-building.

Moreover, such a foundation could adopt an unapologetically developmental investment strategy. Where UTIMCO optimises for returns, the TexHBCU fund could optimise for both returns and racial equity—by investing in Black entrepreneurs, affordable housing, climate-resilient infrastructure, or educational tech. The dual mandate—profit and purpose—would not be a hindrance but a hallmark.

Regional Stakes

Prairie View sits on a rural hilltop. Texas Southern sprawls in urban Houston. But their communities are deeply connected—culturally, economically, demographically. A combined foundation could create regional development strategies that go beyond scholarship aid.

Imagine a venture fund seeding Black-owned start-ups in Houston’s Third Ward. A real estate initiative turning vacant lots into mixed-income housing for PVAMU students and local residents. A workforce development fund retraining returning citizens for green jobs across both cities. Each dollar invested becomes more than a balance sheet entry; it becomes a force for transformation.

This matters not just to students and faculty, but to the broader Texas economy. Black Texans make up 13% of the state population but own less than 3% of its small businesses. Educational attainment gaps persist. Institutional neglect deepens. The merger would not fix all this—but it would give the community a new tool for shaping its destiny.

Copy, Then Paste

If the model works, it would not stay in Texas. Southern University in Louisiana has multiple campuses and foundations that could benefit from consolidation. So does the University System of Maryland’s HBCUs. Indeed, the entire sector could adopt a federated endowment strategy—unified in purpose but distributed in governance.

HBCUs have long suffered from institutional atomisation. They are asked to compete individually in a system that rewards consolidation. Merging foundations is not just a finance play—it is a strategy for survival and sovereignty.

The Alternative: Stagnation

Critics may say a merger is too ambitious. That it risks alumni backlash or donor confusion. That it could take years to execute. But delay is itself a cost. Each year the foundations remain separate is another year of opportunity lost. Another year where millions in potential returns go unrealised. Another year where larger institutions deepen their lead.

PVAMU and TSU have histories to be proud of. But institutional pride must not become institutional inertia. A merger is not surrender—it is evolution.

In the long arc of higher education, moments of boldness define legacy. This is one of those moments. Two foundations. One future. Let the uniting begin.