Top HBCUs: 20 Historically Black Colleges That Set Grads Up For Success
Howard University, one of the nation’s top Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), burst into the national news in July when it abruptly canceled enrollment for 500 freshmen, a fifth of the incoming class. The students had ostensibly missed the deadline for establishing they could cover the Washington, D.C. school’s $66,182 total annual cost of attendance.
Isabella Williams, who graduated from Russell County High School in Alabama last May with a 4.3 grade point average and a raft of honors and scholarships, received one of those jarring notices. Howard was more than her dream school; it was a chance to reclaim her family’s legacy, she told Forbes. Her own mother had been forced to drop out of Howard for financial reasons, but an uncle later served as the university’s vice-provost. "I wasn't able to experience much of my family's culture as a child," she said, "so being able to be closer to them and kind of get the same education that they've had was really important to me.” She eventually got her enrollment reinstated (as did more than 200 other students) after her scholarship money was confirmed. Williams insists that she and some of the others who were disenrolled had documented their payment plans on time and were simply waiting for money from loans, scholarships and veterans benefits to be disbursed.
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.)
Despite its problems, Howard, the alma mater of former Vice President Kamala Harris, ranks #1 among private schools on our list.
Only two HBCUs—Howard and Spelman College in Atlanta—made the 2026 Top 500 list. The HBCUs’ ratings are hurt by, among other factors, relatively low rates of graduation and retention (the percentage of students who return after their first year). Spelman, the alma mater of economist Lisa Cook (now serving on the Federal Reserve Board, despite President Donald Trump’s efforts to fire her), has a 76% graduation rate, the highest on this list. According to Department of Education data, an average of around 60% of freshmen who enter a four year college graduate within six years. For HBCUs, on average, under 40% of freshmen meet that mark, with one of the reasons for those lower rates being the financial challenges many students at these schools face.
North Carolina A&T State University, the #1 ranked public HBCU on the Forbes list, has a graduation rate of 55%. Tennessee State, the #6 ranked public HBCU, has a graduation rate of just 34%. Yet HBCUs can claim some remarkable graduates. Billionaire Oprah Winfrey, #1 on Forbes' recent list of the 250 Greatest Living Self-Made Americans, attended Tennessee State on a full scholarship she won with her speaking skills.
Two student loan changes that kicked in July 1 will hit some HBCUs particularly hard. One involves the Parent PLUS loan program. Previously, parents could borrow directly from Uncle Sam up to the full cost of their children’s undergraduate program not covered by other grants or loans. But new parent borrowers are now limited to $20,500 per year of borrowing with a lifetime limit per undergraduate of $65,000. That could affect the more expensive private HBCUs.
“We've had a huge enrollment surge over the last three years,” exalts Darrell K. Williams, president of Virginia’s Hampton University, ranked #5 among private HBCUs. Between 2022 and 2025, total enrollment grew 46%. But growth and affordability are pulling in opposite directions right now, and Hampton's leadership doesn’t pretend otherwise.
"We're definitely hearing from students and parents and other family members about the challenges that [the new law] has resulted in," says Barbara Inman, Hampton's vice president for student success and enrollment management. The school has responded by partnering with private lenders as part of what Inman calls a "comprehensive plan"—early and repeated communication with families; connections to outside funding; and "Taking Care of Business" sessions that walk parents of undergraduates through their options before the bills come due.
The other big loan change affects graduate students. Previously, under the Grad PLUS program, they too could borrow their full costs. But grad students starting their programs after July 1 are limited to $20,500 a year of borrowing ($100,000 over all their grad studies) or $50,000 a year ($200,000 in total) if they’re in “professional” programs, such as those for doctors, lawyers, dentists, veterinarians and pharmacists. Under final rules issued by the Department of Education, graduate programs educating teachers, social workers and nurses (even nurse practitioners) don’t count as professional and so don’t qualify for the higher borrowing limits. (A court has temporarily blocked the government from excluding nurses.)
Hampton also has a variety of masters and PhD programs, and enrollment in those, particularly in education and nursing, are already showing signs of strain, Williams reports.
Alabama’s Tuskegee University, the #6 ranked private HBCU, has been responding to the federal funding overhaul with what President Mark Brown calls a "gainful employment mindset.” He traces the 145-year-old university's approach back to its founder and first president, Booker T. Washington. "Booker T.'s answer to that was this intersection between training and education," Brown says, describing how Washington had students build the very classrooms they studied in. "You had to come up with a way to use the hand, the heart and the head in order to get out of Tuskegee." Hence, he says, Tuskegee emphasizes internships and professional certifications–even more important these days as hiring of new grads lags.
Tuskegee is the only HBCU with a veterinary school and is known for training engineers and pilots. So Brown, a Tuskegee alum and retired Air Force Major General, is asking employers who need chemical engineers or veterinarians to help remove financial barriers before students graduate, not after. "You can call it philanthropy, or you can call it impact investment," he says, comparing it to how the Air Force pays for a cadet's education in exchange for a service commitment. Tuskegee already has agreements along those lines with companies and federal agencies, including scholarships funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture that are tied to post-graduation work placements.
Brown is playing another financing angle, too. Before becoming Tuskegee’s president in 2024, he worked with private equity billionaire Robert F. Smith on the Student Freedom Initiative, a non-profit Smith seeded in 2020 with a $50 million gift and a mission of reducing the debt burden on HBCU graduates. This year’s incoming Tuskegee veterinary medicine students, who are subject to the new federal loan limits, will be part of a pilot project that will make up for reduced federal loan limits with loans funded by the Smith-backed group.
The structure is built to outlast any one gift: "You don't pay it back to a bank. You don't pay it back to Robert Smith," Brown says. "You pay it back to a fund, and the fund continues to exist for that school, so that the next student can also get [a loan].” Brown notes the model is appropriate for fields like veterinary medicine because default risk for these students is low. He expects other HBCUs are quietly building similar pilot loan programs of their own, as they scramble to adapt and survive.
Sources: Sources: Colleges, National Center for Education Statistics, Payscale, Methodology Described here.