After meeting with President Trump and members of Congress in late February, presidents and chancellors of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) expressed a sense of cautious optimism that there might be more support for their institutions under the new administration. Those hopes were not realized when the administration rolled out its budget proposal on Thursday.
Instead of channeling more dollars to HBCUs, the new administration seeks to maintain current funding levels. Pell Grant funding, a program critical to the continuing viability of many HBCUs, would stay the same, while other programs, like TRIO and GEAR UP, that are designed to help low-income and first-generation college students through college, would see a loss of funding or be eliminated altogether in the Trumpian vision of America.
This is vastly different from the “aspirational” levels of funding that HBCU advocacy organizations, such as the United Negro College Fund (UNCF) and the Thurgood Marshall College Fund (TMCF), were asking for. TMCF requested a $25 billion one-time investment in all 101 of the nation’s accredited HBCUs during a two-day event in late February in which nearly 90 HBCU presidents and chancellors met with Congressional leaders, the president and senior advisers to the president.
Over the course of the same meeting, presidents and chancellors asked for boosts in Pell spending, Title III funding, a restoration of year-round Pell Grants, and investments in technology and support for the preservation of historic buildings on HBCU campuses.
“Right now, we are not coming away with very much,” Dr. David Wilson, president of Morgan State University, an HBCU located in Baltimore, said on Friday. “I hope what the president was doing a couple weeks ago when he was inviting HBCU presidents and chancellors to the White House was something more than ‘sound and fury, signifying nothing.’”
President Trump has said he would “do more for HBCUs than any other president has done before” and signed an executive order in late February shifting the White House Initiative on HBCUs from the U.S. Department of Education to the White House.
Yet the budget put forward on Thursday was a “disappointment,” according to Wilson.
