Days after Spelman College announced it had received a $100 million gift, the largest given to a single HBCU, the United Negro College Fund announced that it, too, had received a $100 million gift from the Lilly Endowment Inc.
“We don’t get a lot of gifts like that,” UNCF president and CEO Michael Lomax said.
It is the largest unrestricted gift ever made to the organization in its 80-year history and will help endow the UNCF’s 37 HBCU members, which includes Spelman. The endowment’s generosity will help make the member institutions more financially stable.
While these sudden windfalls sound impressive, Lomax hastened to put them in perspective.
“HBCUs’ endowments are significantly lower than their non-HBCU peers,” he said. “If you add up the endowments of all 102 HBCUs, you get to about $4 billion. Harvard’s got a $50 billion endowment. So, we have really got to close that gap. We have got to close the wealth gap for these institutions.”
The gaps between HBCUs and non-HBCUs reflects the way it is between Black families and non-Black families, Lomax said.
“They live paycheck to paycheck [and] many of our smaller HBCUs live on the tuition revenue semester by semester,” he said. “They need a cushion. This is that cushion.”
Lomax said that HBCUs have historically always have gotten the most bang for their buck and UNCF statistics support that: HBCUs represent 3 percent of all institutions of higher education but are responsible for producing nearly 20 percent of Black college graduates, 40 percent of Black engineers, 50 percent of Black lawyers, 50 percent of Black doctors and 80 percent of Black judges.
“They have been doing more with less,” Lomax said. “It’s about time they got to do more with more.”
