North Carolina A&T maintains the highest enrollment among historically Black colleges and universities and leads three of four HBCUs in North Carolina that are seeing enrollment growth, a report shared by the NC Department of Commerce affirms.
NC A&T had a Fall 2021 enrollment of 13,322, a rise of 6% since 2019, the report published in The Washington Post shows.
North Carolina Central had 7,953 students enrolled in the fall, a decline of about 1% from 2019, but Winston-Salem State had 5,226 students, up about 2%, and Fayetteville State had 6,754 students, up about 3%.
Howard University trailed A&T, with 12,065 students, but that’s up 28% as HBCUs showed solid growth in enrollment since the pandemic. Prairie View A&M, Florida A&M and Morgan State rounded out the top five. Only FAMU had a decrease in enrollment (7.9%).
Overall the report showed that 11 of the 18 HBCUs nationwide indicated enrollment growth, and one was unchanged.
By comparison, Forbes in November published a report from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center that revealed undergraduate enrollment at all colleges and universities had fallen by 3.5% in Fall 2021, which is a 2-year decline of 7.8% since 2019.
And the enrollment growth HBCUs is coming despite a disparate level of funding when compared to all public colleges and universities. In a separate report earlier this month, Forbes revealed that HBCUs are typically and significantly underfunded and cited A&T as having received half as much per-student allocation ($8,200) as had North Carolina State ($16,400), two schools that are part of the same UNC system.
The report said that between 1987 and 2020, 18 Black schools surveyed were underfunded by $12.8 billion, when adjusted for inflation. The worst of them was A&T, which was underfunded by $2.8 billion.
Source: Fox 8 News Channel