Recognizing resilience: What the numbers really say about HBCUs

In an era when institutional sustainability is under a microscope, it’s time to take a closer look at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) —not just for what they’re up against, but for what they’ve endured.

The opportunity emerges from work conducted at Baker Tilly as part of its ongoing efforts to improve the financial resiliency of colleges and universities nationwide – ensuring they are able to flourish as critical engines of workforce development and social mobility despite massive shifts in the landscape on which they operate.

The work resulted in a tool that leverages longitudinal data, 2010-23 from IPEDS and other publicly available sources. The tool is used to:

• Analyze institutions’ financial strengths and weaknesses
• Benchmark them against peers
• Evaluate their financial vulnerabilities against predictive risk patterns that emerge from mining the larger longitudinal corpus comprising over 3,000 institutions
• Offer guidance based on a database of financial recovery strategies

The tool is also able to profile whole groups of institutions – think, for example, HBCUs – the topic of this blog – rural serving institutions, the institutions that make up a university or college system, and a state’s private or public sector higher education institutions.

The tool has been calibrated against institutions that are closed or acquired, have been put onto heightened cash management, that announce major budget deficits and/or financial cuts and restructuring plans. And because it is designed to learn, it “gets smarter” with every analysis; its predictive powers become increasingly targeted and more reliable.

More details about the tool and its operations are forthcoming.

In the meantime, this blog represents the first based on insights derived from its ongoing use. It is a cross-sector analysis of HBCUs, and it paints a picture that’s both familiar and revealing. Familiar because these institutions have long operated at the intersection of high mission and high constraint. Revealing because the data shows just how consistently they’ve adapted across Carnegie Classifications and governance structures—and what that says about the systems surrounding them.

Topline takeaway: HBCUs tend to fall in the moderate risk zone on financial health assessments—not because they’re flush, but because they’ve learned to navigate volatility without the cushions most of their peers take for granted. Their performance metrics show resilience, yes—but also dependency. Not on tuition or endowment income. On policy.