“I chose an HBCU because I felt safe — especially now during the Trump presidency, it’s scary to go out in a world where you feel less than human and people close to my age are being murdered for the color of their skin,” said Jourdan Clark, 22, a senior at Dillard University, a historically black college in New Orleans.
Faith Wykle, 19, said the presidential election and its aftermath also played a role in why she chose Smith College, a women’s college in Massachusetts, even though she had assumed she would go to a coed institution.
“When I applied to college it was 2016, and the election stuff was heating up,” she said. “What that showed me was the massive issues our country still faces with sexism and bias. It cast a light on things. I felt like this was a place I could be challenged but also grow.”
Nationwide, there are 102 active historically black public and private colleges and universities, known as HBCUs — institutions established before 1964 to educate black students who were often barred from white schools. About 10 percent of African-American college students attend an HBCU.
According to national education figures, from 2014 to 2017, the number of first-year students who enrolled increased to 41,000 from about 36,000, and applications have jumped about 20 percent, said Andrés Castro Samayoa, an assistant professor of higher education at Boston College. More white and Hispanic students are also attending HBCUs. And this at a time of declining college enrollment overall.
And despite some hard years for many women’s colleges — only 38 exist, compared with 64 in 2000, according to the Women’s College Coalition — applications and enrollment are also up overall. Enrollment of first-year students jumped to almost 13,000 in 2017, from 9,000 in 2014, according to its figures.
At Smith College, the difference now, said Audrey Smith, vice president for enrollment, “is that more applicants are embracing the fact it’s a women’s college, rather than falling in love with Smith and then applying to it in spite of it being a women’s college.”
There are numerous reasons students choose a historically black or women’s college — many offer first-rate academics, small classes and easy access to professors. In addition, tuition at HBCUs has traditionally been lower than at other institutions. But few doubt that recent interest is related to the current political climate.
Marybeth Gasman, a professor of higher education at the University of Pennsylvania, has been studying HBCUs for decades. She estimates that until three years ago, she would receive about eight phone calls and emails yearly from students and parents asking about such colleges, with questions typically related to academics and whether it would hurt a student’s future choices to choose an HBCU.
“In the past three years I’ve received between 80 and 100 a year,” she said. “Nearly all those phone calls or emails or Facebook messages ask one question: ‘Do you think it would be better for my child to go to an HBCU in the current political climate?’ Students ask, ‘Do you think I will be safer at an HBCU?’ To me, this has really been powerful.”
The growing interest in historically black and women’s colleges plays into the debate about campus “safe spaces” — which some see as a way for students to feel both emotionally and physically secure, and others view as a way to cater to a generation of snowflakes who melt under the slightest disagreement or negativity.
Research from the Gallup organization shows that graduates of HBCUs tend to report better college experiences than African-American students at mostly white colleges and are almost twice as likely to agree that their university prepared them well for life outside of college. And other research found that women’s institutions — more so than coed ones — have created a climate “where women are encouraged to realize their potential and to become involved in various facets of campus life, inside and outside the classroom.”
A common criticism, which students can hear from family, friends and counselors, is that they are choosing to attend a place that doesn’t reflect “the real world.”
“That’s a dangerous misconception,” said Wykle, a sophomore at Smith. She acknowledged the belief among some that women choose a single-sex school because “they hate men, they don’t want to be with them, and they want to escape.
“That wasn’t my thought process at all,” she said. “Choosing a women’s college wasn’t about escape — college is a time to figure out who you are. I didn’t want to be missing out on things because of my gender or being put down in class because of my gender. It’s hard to be a positive and confident woman when people are saying you’re loud or bossy or too opinionated.”
And few colleges are actually as segregated as they may appear to outsiders — women’s colleges usually have partnerships with coed universities, and black colleges can be more diverse than predominantly white institutions.
“A black student at an HBCU will have a much better chance of having a white professor than a white student at a predominantly white institution will have of having a black professor,” said Walter Kimbrough, president of Dillard.
Not everyone ascribes the growing interest to the political environment. At two of the top HBCUs in the country, Howard University in Washington and Spelman College in Atlanta, the presidents said that while national events might play a role, it was academic excellence that attracted students.
“I hesitate to attribute the change to the political environment in Washington,” said Mary Schmidt Campbell, president of Spelman, one of two all-women HBCUs. “I honestly believe the reason our application numbers have gone up is that the college has done a better job telling the Spelman story. Everything on this campus is designed to contribute to the success of the black women who enroll here.”
Leocadia Zak, president of Agnes Scott, a women’s college in Decatur, Georgia, credits her college’s growth — last year it had its largest incoming class in history — to the establishment of its Summit curriculum, which is focused on leadership and global learning; among other things, it requires every first-year student to journey abroad for a week and take classes on leadership throughout their four years.
But David Wilson, president of Morgan State University, an HBCU in Baltimore, where the digital sign in front of the school sometimes reads, “Morgan State University: Where Black Lives Have Always Mattered,” has no doubt that the 2016 election, the shooting of unarmed black men by the police and numerous racial attacks in the past several years have drawn many students to his university. Last year, it had the largest freshman class in almost two decades, he said.
“Many of them, particularly those who grew up in suburbia, had very few black teachers and were sometimes the only black student in class,” Wilson said of the new students. “If you overlay that with the national climate, they wanted places like Morgan, where they could be truly valued and respected. They can also learn about themselves and their history in a way they did not in high school.”
Leah Erby, 20, a Dillard junior from Chicago, agreed. She went to a mostly white Catholic high school after attending elementary and middle school with primarily black students.
“Going to that high school made me realize blacks and white are not equal — I wasn’t oblivious before, but here it was in my face,” she said.
Kimbrough of Dillard has called the trend “the Missouri effect,” referring to student protests in 2015 regarding racist incidents at the University of Missouri that led to the resignation of the university system president and campus chancellor.
“That was a catalyst for black students on white campuses,” he said. “Then in fall of 2016 was the presidential election, which added another layer for students that was contentious. More students were saying, ‘I’m not putting up with this — let me take a second look at HBCUs.'”
In an effort to dig beneath the anecdotes, Janelle Williams, a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Center for Minority Serving Institutions, and Robert Palmer, an associate professor at Howard, have conducted surveys and interviews with 20 students at Howard and 20 at Clark Atlanta University, another HBCU, with plans to interview more.
Preliminary findings from the study, to be released in October, back up the Trump bump theory, Palmer said.
“We were shocked at how many said the racialized rhetoric of Trump led them to seek an HBCU,” Palmer said. “They wanted to be in a safe space — that was a common theme across the majority of interviews.”
Wykle, the Smith College sophomore, said she believed that attending a women’s college would make her more, not less, prepared to face life’s travails.
“You don’t leave wanting to hide away from the world,” she said. “I think you leave knowing you want to take it on. A lot of the negative stereotypes associated with women’s colleges and HBCUs come from a place of fear, because we live in a society that puts down women and people of color.
“Then you have people coming out of those colleges with a sense of who they are and the ability to stand there and say, ‘I’m not afraid — bring what you will and I will bounce back with everything I’ve got’ — and I think that scares a lot of people.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.