There comes a point when praising HBCUs for their resilience becomes a convenient way to avoid asking why so much resilience is still required.
There is a phrase we use when talking about Historically Black Colleges and Universities that sounds like praise until you spend some time thinking about what it actually means. We say HBCUs have learned to “do more with less,” usually with admiration for their ingenuity, determination and ability to produce extraordinary graduates without the financial resources available to many other institutions. I understand the sentiment because there is something worth respecting about any institution that refuses to allow limited resources to determine the limits of its ambition. What troubles me is how easily admiration for that resilience can become acceptance of the conditions that made the resilience necessary.
Doing more with less may be evidence of good stewardship, demonstrating creativity, discipline and deep institutional commitment. But when the “less” continues decade after decade, particularly when it can be traced to unequal public funding, smaller endowments, limited access to capital and policies rooted in a history of segregation, we need to stop treating scarcity as part of the charm of the HBCU experience. At some point, chronic underfunding ceases to be a testament to resilience and becomes clear evidence of inequity.
There is a difference between an institution choosing to be efficient and an institution being required to compensate for resources it should have had in the first place. We understand that distinction almost everywhere else. If a public school district continually produces excellent students despite outdated textbooks, aging buildings and inadequate technology, we may admire the teachers and students, but no serious person would argue that their success makes those deficiencies acceptable. If a hospital consistently provides excellent care despite being understaffed and operating with aging equipment, we do not use the dedication of its employees as evidence that additional resources are unnecessary. Yet when HBCUs succeed under similar financial constraints, their ability to overcome those constraints often becomes part of the argument for why the urgency of addressing them is somehow lessened. That is a strange reward for competence.
The physical condition of many HBCU campuses illustrates the problem. In a Government Accountability Office review of HBCU capital needs, responding institutions reported that an average of 46% of their building space needed repair or replacement. The report identified significant needs involving deferred maintenance, modernization and preservation of historic buildings, while noting that HBCUs often relied on a relatively limited range of funding sources to address those needs.
Think about what deferred maintenance actually means in an educational environment. It means laboratories waiting to be modernized, residence halls requiring renovation, heating and cooling systems reaching the end of their useful lives, classrooms needing technological upgrades and historic buildings deteriorating faster than institutions can afford to preserve them. These are not cosmetic concerns. Facilities directly influence student recruitment, research capacity, campus experience, faculty retention and an institution’s ability to compete for opportunities that generate additional revenue.
Scarcity has consequences far beyond what is visible from the sidewalk. A university with a smaller endowment has less financial flexibility when an unexpected expense occurs. It has fewer unrestricted dollars available to recruit top faculty, establish endowed positions, provide institutional scholarships, seed new research, modernize equipment or pursue opportunities that require significant upfront investment. An institution with limited research infrastructure becomes less competitive for major federal research funding, which makes building that infrastructure even more difficult over time. Financial disadvantages have a way of reproducing themselves because money in higher education does more than pay bills; it creates the capacity to attract more capital.
This is why comparisons between institutions can be misleading when they focus only on outcomes and ignore starting points. Two universities may compete for the same professor, researcher, federal grant, corporate partnership or high-achieving student, even though they enter that competition with vastly different financial reserves. If one institution has spent generations building wealth, state support, donor networks and research infrastructure while another has spent much of that same history operating under unequal conditions, calling the competition equal simply because both can submit an application ignores everything that happened before the application was opened.
Prairie View A&M University offers an especially important lens through which to understand this history because it is one of the nation’s historically Black land-grant universities. The land-grant system was built around the idea that public investment in higher education could strengthen agriculture, engineering, research and the economic development of entire communities. Black land-grant institutions were eventually created within that system, but being included in the structure did not guarantee that they received resources comparable to their white counterparts. That distinction between being permitted to participate and being positioned to compete is one that appears repeatedly throughout Black institutional history.
It also explains why I am uncomfortable when resilience becomes the dominant language we use to describe HBCUs. Resilience tells us something admirable about the institution, but it can distract us from asking what the institution has been forced to endure. There is a point at which constantly praising people or institutions for surviving adversity begins to sound like permission for that adversity to continue.
I have seen enough of Prairie View to understand that the conversation about resources cannot be separated from the conversation about expectations. We expect HBCUs to prepare students for industries being transformed by artificial intelligence, advanced manufacturing, biotechnology, cybersecurity, engineering and data science. We expect them to conduct meaningful research, recruit accomplished faculty, maintain competitive facilities, provide robust student services, increase graduation rates, build corporate partnerships and remain affordable to populations that may have fewer financial resources available to them. Those are reasonable expectations for modern universities, but what is unreasonable is pretending that expectations and resources have nothing to do with one another. You cannot demand twenty-first-century outcomes indefinitely while treating twenty-first-century investment as optional.
That does not mean every financial challenge facing an HBCU can be attributed to discrimination or historical underfunding. Institutions still have responsibilities. Leadership matters, governance matters, financial management matters, alumni giving matters and enrollment strategy matters. Universities must be accountable for the decisions they make with the resources entrusted to them, and a serious argument for greater investment acknowledges institutional responsibility without allowing that responsibility to erase structural history.
Accountability and equity are not opposing ideas. Equitable investment should come with high expectations because the entire point is to give institutions the capacity to demonstrate what they can build when unnecessary limitations are removed. The goal should never be to lower standards for HBCUs; the goal is to stop pretending that holding institutions to comparable standards while providing dramatically different levels of accumulated resources constitutes fairness.
There is another reason this matters. The language of “doing more with less” can quietly shape expectations inside the institutions themselves. Scarcity can become so familiar that people begin designing around it rather than imagining beyond it. Administrators become experts at stretching budgets, faculty learn to improvise, students learn to navigate limitations and communities step in where institutional resources fall short. All of that demonstrates incredible commitment, but there is a danger in becoming so skilled at surviving scarcity that survival begins to define the boundaries of what people believe is possible.
I do not want HBCUs to lose that resourcefulness. I want them to have the resources to apply it to innovation instead of constantly applying it to compensation.
Imagine what changes when the question facing a university president is no longer which aging building receives attention first, but which new research initiative should receive investment. Imagine faculty spending less energy navigating limitations and more energy developing laboratories, patents, companies and discoveries. Imagine talented students choosing an HBCU not only because of its history, culture and sense of belonging, but because its facilities, research opportunities and technological infrastructure rival anything available anywhere else. That should not be treated as an unrealistic vision for institutions that have already demonstrated their ability to produce extraordinary outcomes.
The phrase “doing more with less” has survived because there is truth inside it. HBCUs have done remarkable things with resources that rarely reflected the magnitude of their responsibility or their contribution. There is pride in that history, and there should be. But pride should not prevent us from recognizing the difference between honoring what people accomplished under difficult conditions and insisting that difficult conditions remain part of the experience.
We have spent enough time admiring how efficiently HBCUs can stretch a dollar. The next measure of our respect should be whether we are willing to give them enough dollars to stretch their imagination.