A group of professors and deans at Morgan State University is researching why fewer Black men are enrolling in college, including at their own historically-Black institution.
Since 2010, Morgan State’s share of Black men on campus has declined by 25%, making up only 37% of the student body this year. Despite that, 2024 marks the Baltimore university’s fourth year of record overall enrollment.
That disparity is sounding the alarm, said Michael Sinclair, social work professor at Morgan and co-chair of the new 20-member taskforce.
“This is what I consider a canary in a coal mine,” Sinclair told WYPR. “If an HBCU is having these challenges, then a PWI is quite naturally having these challenges too.”
PWI stands for Predominantly-White Institutions, which represent the majority of America’s higher education institutions.
Sinclair said the new task force will first focus on barriers and remedies specific to Morgan State students and the larger Baltimore region. Then, they’ll move to looking at historically-Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) as a whole.
As the third-largest HBCU in the country with nearly eleven thousand students, Sinclair said Morgan is in an ideal position to lead the charge.
“If we don't take the bull by the horns right now, it's going to continue in this negative trend, and it may be catastrophic for many communities,” Sinclair said. “When we see a community that does not have Black men enrolling into college, then their job prospects are limited. And if their job prospects are limited, their ability to provide for their families is limited.”
Raymond Winbush is the director of Morgan’s Institute for Urban Research and a member of the task force. On WYPR’s Midday show Wednesday, he said there’s only one HBCU in the nation that currently enrolls more men than women: Morehouse College in Atlanta.
A 2024 study from the American Institute for Boys and Men found that there are fewer men enrolled at HBCUs today than there were in 1976.
Sinclair said he expects financial concerns play a big role in the dropoff.
“Black men are acutely sensitive to poor economic resources and finances,” he said. “If we lose our track team or our basketball team is not able to give full scholarships, and you see the enrollment decrease.”
He also said many Black men are the first in their family to attend college. That could cause nationwide issues like last year’s FAFSA disruptions to hit Black male students especially hard.
“We get a lot of still, first generation folks that are coming in that need that sort of, not only incubation, but also that cultivation, that nurturance,” Sinclair said.
The task force wasn’t established with the goal of examining PWIs and Black male students. But Sinclair said the Supreme Court’s recent ban on affirmative action and Trump-era attacks on diversity are motivating members to eventually expand the scope.
“There's been a paradigm shift in our government, and we need to address it now more than ever,” he said.
Black male students face even harsher barriers to entry and success at PWIs, with higher likelihood of experiencing discrimination from professors and peers.
“At an institution such as Morgan, they come there knowing that they belong,” said E.R. Shipp, a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist and professor at Morgan State who also recently appeared on WYPR’s Midday. “That doesn't mean that they are not challenged. But it's with their best interests in mind all the time, so they don't have to prove themselves other than to prove themselves capable of doing the assignments.”
Winbush says that lack of belonging and fear of discrimination are fueling an overall increase in HBCU enrollment that boomed in 2020.
“And that was in part because of the death of George Floyd, and people simply didn't feel safe with their kids going to a PWI,” he said.
But building community is still an ongoing effort at HBCUs. Morgan State Senior Shaune Payne leads Strong Men Overcoming Obstacles Through Hard Work (SMOOTH), a group of around 80 Black male students that help each other navigate college life.
Payne said he spent his first semester holed up in a dorm room. But joining SMOOTH kept him enrolled.
“There are times I used to battle with my mind and just think, ‘Oh, I cannot do this anymore,’” Payne said. “A lot of people think when you go into college it's all about funding and money. But if you don't have that emotional and moral support, you're gonna want to drop out.”
Payne says groups like SMOOTH should be at every university. He also thinks colleges need to improve recruitment strategies to get more Black men on campus.
“What kind of conversations are we having with our middle schoolers and our high schoolers?” Payne asked. “Are historically-Black colleges targeting males when they're doing their outreach programs?”
Sinclair said the task force aims to look at the Black enrollment decline holistically.
“We're not only taking a look at what's happening from pre-K through 12,” he said. “We're taking a look at the recruitment effort and the marketing effort, but we're also taking a look at, how can we sustain them? How can we support them while they're on campus?”
Sinclair said he hopes to feature more input from students like Payne as the task force moves forward with its research. Right now, the student government president is the only young representative in the group.
“We have to be realistic in what we can do,” Sinclair said. “And we need to hear the voices of the young men themselves, because what was true in 1980, when some of us were going to school, may not be true in 2025.”
