In September, the US government announced a one-off US$495-million funding boost for historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and tribal colleges and universities (TCUs). This is welcome news — but doesn’t redress their chronic underfunding.
The financial shackling of historically Black universities in the United States
In the United States, HBCUs educate 1.5% of all university students — yet receive only 0.9% of federal research and development (R&D) funding. Data reported in 2024 show combined HBCU endowment assets around $100,000 per student. By contrast, the ten wealthiest US universities received $2 million to $7 million per student in 2023.
As a scientist and administrator at Meharry Medical College — a 150-year-old private historically Black health-sciences institution in Nashville, Tennessee, with some 1,500 students — I’ve seen how hard it can be to manage on scant budgets. I urge the government to redress funding levels. In the meantime, HBCUs and TCUs can target their investments, as Meharry has done with some success.
Over the past decade, Meharry has increased its funds for research, and its scholarly output, by using metrics to guide budgeting and investments. We tracked publications and citations, grants, awards, student engagement, graduation and career placement rates, facility use, data generation and sharing (how many samples were processed, what data sets were produced and how were shared), research collaborations and investigator diversity. We also expanded our number of sponsors and monitored how funds were used.
Between the periods of 2010–15 and 2020–25, the number of cross-disciplinary collaborations increased, both between groups at Meharry and with external investigators. The number of papers with Meharry authors indexed in the PubMed database of biomedical literature rose from 444 to 1,067.
End racism in science
Three measures underpin this growth. First, we established transdisciplinary pilot grants of $50,000–$75,000 per faculty member lasting for 12–18 months — funded by federal research endowments or private foundations — to seed ideas and support core staff and infrastructure. While maintaining budgets for ongoing cancer, HIV and oral-health studies, we prioritized new projects in genomics, inflammation, immunity and cardiometabolic health. We also launched two new schools: one in applied computational sciences, in 2021; and one in global health, in 2023.
Second, we invested in infrastructure to handle, store and analyse data securely. We established procedures — including some around human consent and data sovereignty — that meet both federal and Tribal Nations’ standards. Studies that involve human participants must be co-designed with community members to ensure that any concerns — for example, about privacy, potential stigma or data misuse — are addressed early on. Steps such as pre-consented sharing of electronic health records or clinical notes can help to accelerate the analysis of disease risk, treatment response and gaps in care, to inform services and policies that benefit local people. This transparent and respectful approach deepens public confidence in science, especially among populations long marginalized in research.
