By Julianne Malveaux
(Trice Edney Wire) – This week I am thinking about what it means to go back to school in a country that still rations opportunity. The stores are selling backpacks and dorm décor, but the deeper question is who gets access to education, who must borrow for it, and which institutions continue to carry the burden of Black possibility.
The fireworks have dimmed, and the Fourth-of-You-Lie sales are waning. In this country, we commemorate through commerce and celebrate through retail activity, so even though we are just a few days into July, back-to-school signs are already shouting from store windows and websites.
Who is going back to school, and under what circumstances?
As with every milestone in this country, inequality roars. Some students will return to school with new laptops, quiet rooms, family-paid tuition, and networks that cushion every stumble. Others will return carrying debt, doubt, family obligations, food insecurity, transportation challenges, and the accumulated disadvantages of underfunded schools and under-resourced communities.
The back-to-school season is marketed as a fresh start. For too many students, it is also a reminder that opportunity in America has always been rationed.
That is why Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) still matter. Indeed, that is why HBCUs remain the vanguard.
The vanguard is not always the largest part of the army. It is the front edge. It moves first. It absorbs blows. It clears the path. By that definition, HBCUs have always been the vanguard. They were built because this country’s higher education system excluded Black people by law, custom, violence, and contempt. Their founding question was not, “How do we reproduce privilege?” Their founding question was, “How do we cultivate genius where America has refused to see it?”
That question remains urgent.
HBCUs enroll only a fraction of Black college students, but their impact is outsized. In 2022, HBCUs enrolled about 9 percent of Black college students, yet they produced 16 percent of the bachelor’s degrees earned by Black students in 2021–22. UNCF reports that HBCUs generate $16.5 billion in annual economic impact, support more than 136,000 jobs, and that the 2021 HBCU graduating class is projected to earn $146 billion over their lifetimes.
These are not sentimental institutions. They are economic engines, leadership factories, and community anchors.
Still, HBCUs are too often asked to do transformative work with transactional support.
That contradiction is especially sharp now, as federal student loan policy shifts under the feet of students and families. The Biden-era SAVE plan — Saving on a Valuable Education — was designed to make repayment less punishing by tying payments to income and family size, reducing monthly payments for many borrowers, limiting runaway interest, and creating a shorter forgiveness path for some small-balance borrowers. Now SAVE has ended, and millions of borrowers have been told to move into other repayment plans.
The change lands first on borrowers already in repayment, but current students are not untouched. Undergraduates will face a narrower repayment landscape when they leave school. Families will confront new Parent PLUS limits. Graduate and professional students will face new borrowing caps just as advanced credentials remain expensive and often necessary. Graduate PLUS loans, which previously allowed many graduate students to borrow up to the cost of attendance, are being phased out for new borrowers. Grad PLUS was the backstop many students used when tuition and living costs exceeded unsubsidized loan limits.
These numbers are not abstractions. They determine who can become a nurse practitioner, a physical therapist, a psychologist, a professor, a public health leader, a lawyer, a dentist, a physician, or a minister. They determine who can move from the first degree to the next rung. They determine whether talent is nurtured or stranded.
For Black students, the stakes are higher because the debt burden is heavier. Black students are more likely to borrow for college, more likely to borrow more, and more likely to struggle in repayment because the racial wealth gap follows them from home to campus and from campus to workplace. A loan policy that may look race-neutral on paper can still deepen racial inequality in practice.
That is the context in which HBCUs do their work. They educate students through inequality, against inequality, and beyond inequality. They do not merely polish privilege. They cultivate possibility. They take seriously the students America too often treats as afterthoughts, and they turn potential into leadership.
Having led an HBCU, I know both the miracle, the math, and the myth. At Bennett College, I saw daily what HBCUs do with too little: stretch dollars, nurture brilliance, hold students close, and insist that Black women’s futures were worth fighting for. I know the devotion of faculty, the exhaustion of administrators, the anxiety of families, and the constant scramble for resources. I also know this: HBCUs cannot be praised in February and underfunded in July. They cannot be applauded at commencements and ignored in appropriations. They cannot be celebrated as cultural treasures while their students are left to navigate a debt system that punishes aspiration.
The country loves the symbolism of back-to-school season. New backpacks. New notebooks. New slogans. But the real question is not what is on sale, it’s what is at stake.
If HBCUs are the vanguard, then the question is not whether they have earned our admiration. They have. The question is whether they will receive the investment, protection, and respect that their record demands.
Back to school should not mean back to debt, back to rationed opportunity, or back to the same old inequalities dressed up in fresh retail packaging. It should mean back to possibility. Back to purpose. Back to institutions that have carried us when the broader society would not.
HBCUs are still carrying us. The question is whether public policy will finally carry its share.
