On CNN, Wayne Frederick, Howard’s interim (and former) president, explained the thinking behind the disenrollment letters. While the school is in “high demand,” he said, its graduation rate (most recently 69%) has been declining because it has allowed too many students to start without a viable financial plan in place to complete their degrees.
The Howard episode dramatically illustrates two seemingly contradictory facts about the 10 private and 10 public schools honored on Forbes’ first-ever ranking of America’s Top HBCUs. Their popularity is growing, even as their longstanding financial problems (and those of their students) are worsening.
On July 1, cuts to federal student loans programs and new limits on eligibility for federal Pell Grants for lower-income students started to kick in. All were passed in 2025 as part of Republicans’ One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The reductions pose challenges for all schools, but particularly for HBCUs, which typically have a higher percentage of low-income students than their predominantly white counterparts and have far smaller endowments available to subsidize those students themselves. (According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 56% of HBCU students received Pell Grants in the 2023-2024 school year, compared to 32% of all undergraduates.)
Meanwhile, the nation’s 100 HBCUs, which have historically played an outsized role in educating the nation’s Black doctors, lawyers, judges, engineers and teachers, have experienced a resurgence in popularity. After shrinking from 1976 to 2014, the share of Black college students choosing to attend an HBCU has stabilized and even grown, with the 2020 murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision outlawing affirmative action, and the Trump Administration’s current assault on college diversity programs leading more Black students to seek out HBCUs for a sense of belonging and connection. (The schools, which were mostly created during the Reconstruction period after the Civil War, now have a student body that is about 75% Black.)
Top HBCUs: 20 Historically Black Colleges That Set Grads Up For Success
