Sybille Delice, a Haitian-American student from Everett, is enrolling this fall at Howard University, one of the nation’s oldest historically Black colleges and universities.
She said she wanted to be around other Black students after finishing an internship working with other students of color in a Cambridge lab.
“All self-doubt was out the window,” Delice said of the internship experience. “I was able to see myself in people who were smart and people who were capable.”
More students are enrolling in HBCUs in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court decision banning affirmative action policies that made it easier for Black and brown students to gain admission to colleges with mostly white student populations.
MIT is one of the few institutions to publicly release admissions data showing
a loss of diversity since the ruling last year. Earlier this month, MIT said enrollment among Black, Hispanic and Indigenous students fell to 16 percent this fall, from an average of 25 percent in the years before the Supreme Court ruling.
During the same period, undergraduate enrollment at HBCUs rose four percent, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
“Black students want to be in environments that are affirming, where they feel like they have community, people who understand them … build them up and lead them to be successful in the careers,” said Jhenai Chandler, former senior director at the Institute for College Access and Success. Students want “to build social capital and networks amongst their peers.”
Colleges built by and for Black students have been around prior to the Civil War, offering degrees to Black students who were excluded from attending primarily white colleges due to discrimination. As of 2022, there were
99 HBCUs in the US, mostly in southern states.
Massachusetts has none. But admissions officers and alumni at several prominent HBCUs said student applications from the Bay State students are on the rise.
Bianca Sullivan, president of Howard University’s Massachusetts alumni club, said 87 members of Howard’s incoming class this fall are from Massachusetts, the most in the school’s history. Overall, applications are up 12 percent from a year ago.
Sullivan said the the historic role HBCUs have played in the U.S. education landscape continues as efforts to diversify colleges and universities slow.
“I think the mission of HBCUs has been reiterated, seeing that affirmative action has kind of dismissed some of the progress we’ve made within the education system,” Sullivan told GBH.
HBCUs have also become more attractive as scholarships for students of color have been canceled or made race-neutral in the wake of the affirmative action decision.
The Washington Post
identified nearly 50 institutions that have reduced or eliminated race-conscious scholarships, amounting to at least $45 million.
Duke University, for example, ended a full-ride scholarship for Black applicants following the ruling. The University of Missouri
removed race as a factor in scholarships totaling more than $16 million. Other state schools in Ohio, Wisconsin and Iowa paused or reconfigured race-conscious scholarships.
Katharine Meyer, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, cited an absence of scholarships and the dismantling of diversity programming as part of a broader shift in higher education with big implications for students who are Black, Indigenous, or people of color.
“It makes it very hard for a student to envision the support they need existing, once they enroll,” she said.
Haley McGee, an incoming freshman at the all-female HBCU Spelman College in Atlanta, told GBH that she is not deterred by these apparent discrepancies. “I am extremely confident in my school and the resources that it possesses to make me someone in tomorrow’s society,” she said recently.
Growing up attending schools in the predominantly white Massachusetts city of Attleboro, McGee was drawn to Spelman because she doesn’t need to “code switch” anymore, she said. She also said that she and her peers are concerned about the long term effects of affirmative action on diversity.
“Some people found HBCUs more stable in the sense of being seen, represented, and welcomed,” she said.
Spelman Senior Vice President Ingrid Hayes said the court’s ruling on affirmative action helped drive an 11 percent increase in applications from Massachusetts this year.
“We have enjoyed strong numbers of applications from an even broader variety of high schools as more students seek an academic and social environment that is centered on their experiences,” she said in an email.
Leyah Henry, a freshman at Morgan State University in Maryland, said she was drawn to the school’s academic offerings and an appealing sorority.
Applications to Morgan State by Massachusetts students rose 15 percent.
Henry, who is from Cambridge originally, told GBH that “high standards” from families or students themselves drive people to top-ranked, big name white institutions.
For a long time, HBCUs have had a financial disadvantage for top students of color who needed financial aid, Jhenai Chandler said. Non-HBCUs “typically have larger endowments, and can offer much more financial support, making their institutions more accessible.”
Now, with some race-conscious scholarships at primarily white schools also dissolving, the cost concerns for Black students are the same in both options, she said.
Colleges are also dismantling their diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in states that have recently banned it or proposed to do so. That includes schools in 15 states, including Alabama, Florida, and Texas.
In Massachusetts, both Harvard and MIT recently eliminated diversity statements in faculty hiring.
Such rollbacks make colleges “less confident in their ability to offer services for underrepresented students,” Meyer said.
If a campus grows less diverse, the shift is likely to affect how Black students think about where they want to spend four years of their lives and a big chunk of money.
Meyer describes a “spiral” where “a relatively small decline in enrollment starts accumulating year over year.”
“Students look at a college and they see fewer students like them, and so they might be less likely to go to that college,” she said. “Then there are even fewer students of that racial group the following year that the prospective students are looking at.”
At the same time, competition for seats at HBCUs is on the rise.
Kelsey Rountree, assistant director of admissions at Hampton University in Virginia, said the school saw the most competitive pool of applicants this year of her six years working in admissions.
Hampton nearly doubled the number of applicants from Massachusetts students, she said.
Rountree said the application increase could lead to a potential restructuring of admission criteria.
While that’s good news for the college and not great news for students, it remains just a consideration for now.