Congress has a chance in the coming months to close a loophole that has allowed states to deprive Black land-grant universities of $200 million in matching funds over the past decade even as they’ve generously supported predominantly white land grants, a new report from the Century Foundation says.
The federal Farm Bill, a package of legislation that provides federal dollars to all land-grant colleges, comes up for reauthorization every five years, and the current version is set to expire September 30. The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank, has offered a series of recommendations to reduce disparities that it says have forced Black land-grant universities to operate since their inception “on shoestring budgets.”
Many experts expect these institutions and other historically Black colleges to play a growing role in educating minority students in a post-affirmative action world, especially at a time when college diversity efforts are under attack in many states. Students who either feel unwelcome at predominantly white colleges or worry they won’t get in to highly selective institutions following the U.S. Supreme Court’s rejection of race-conscious admissions decisions may take a closer look at HBCUs, including the 19 that are federally designated land-grant institutions.
But decades of discriminatory funding have left many of these universities with deteriorating infrastructures and inadequate housing. Without significant boosts of support to hire more faculty, expand technology, and offer more scholarships, they may be unprepared to accommodate a significant influx of students, their advocates say.
The latest demand for more-equitable funding also comes as several leading HBCUs are seeking to expand their research footprints and join the ranks of Carnegie Research 1 universities. Research expenditures per full-time equivalent student are nearly three times greater at the predominantly white land-grant institutions than at their Black counterparts — $10,774 versus $3,388, the study found. That’s due in part to “deeply embedded biases, double standards, and scrutiny” that Black institutions face when competing for federal or state research support, the report contends.
The nation’s land-grant system was established with the 1862 Morrill Act, under which the federal government provided money to establish 57 public colleges for agriculture, engineering, and related disciplines. These funds had to be matched with non-federal dollars, and states generally provided the required dollar-to-dollar match for these institutions.
Because of Jim Crow-era laws in the segregated South, Black students were unable to attend colleges established in the 1862 act. In 1890, a second Morrill Act set up a separate land-grant system for Black students. It eventually grew to 19 historically Black institutions, mostly in the South, which formed the start of the nation’s HBCU system. (A third system was set up in 1994 for tribal land-grant colleges.)
Between 2011 and 2022 alone, Black land-grant universities lost nearly $200 million in resources because states declined to provide them with matching funds.
But differences in the ways these laws were set up created widening rifts in the wealth of Black and white land grants over the ensuing decades. The 1890 law allowed the Black institutions to request a waiver of up to 50 percent of the 1:1 match in order to ensure that they wouldn’t lose out on the federal funds. When states balked at providing even a 50-percent match, Black colleges were forced to dip into their own resources. That’s one reason endowments are six times greater at the 1862 institutions than at the 1890 institutions — $77,103 per full-time equivalent student compared to $12,532, according to the report.
“The law required states to establish a ‘just and equitable’ division of monies between the 1862 and 1890 universities,” the report states, “yet ambiguity in the legislative language created a loophole that would position states to provide greater and inequitable shares of appropriations to white land-grant institutions, while starving Black land-grant institutions.”
As a result, between 2011 and 2022 alone, Black land-grant universities lost nearly $200 million in resources because states declined to provide them with matching funds, while fully funding their predominantly white counterparts, the Century Foundation report states.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture “looks the other way” when such discriminatory funding happens, the report charges.
In a statement to The Chronicle, a USDA spokesperson said the department’s ongoing support for 1890 institutions includes a recently announced investment of $262.5 million to train and educate the next generation of diverse food and agriculture professionals. “USDA will continue to look at every tool in its toolbox to close the funding gap between 1890 and 1862 land-grant Institutions, and work with Congress and states to ensure that these institutions are getting the investments they need and deserve,” the statement read.
The nation’s 19 Black land-grant institutions contribute $5.5 billion toward local, state, and national economies, the report notes, generating more than $52 billion in lifetime earnings for each graduating class. Their work supports teaching, research, and cooperative extension programs that help low-income and minority farmers. Three-quarters of their students are Black and 57 percent receive Pell Grants.
The report includes a series of policy recommendations for the 2023 Farm Bill, including phasing out the waiver for dollar-for-dollar state matching of federal research money for the 1890 institutions and $600 million in new “equity funding” for these colleges. It also recommends providing $100 million to expand student scholarships at the 1890 institutions.
“HBCUs have always provided an excellent education but have never been given the support they need to live out their mission to the fullest extent,” the report’s author, Denise A. Smith, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, said in an interview on Tuesday. “This is an opportunity to prioritize Black students and institutions in a way that’s never been done before and to undo what has been done to stifle Black opportunity.”
Because of decades of state underfunding, Tennessee State University was deprived of as much as a half a billion dollars in state funding it should have gotten since 1957, a state legislative committee found. The university announced in January that it will receive $250 million, mostly for infrastructure repair.
And over the past four years, the report notes, Prairie View A&M University lost more than $22 million, Alcorn State University more than $12 million, and Florida A&M University more than $9 million in state resources they should have received.
“For those institutions that do not receive their full state match, the consequences are significant in terms of loss of needed resources to invest in research and extension services that benefit rural farmers and communities,” it states.
“There’s always been this narrative that HBCUs do more with less,” Smith told The Chronicle, “but we should no longer have to do more with less.”