of its black doctors. Among black college graduates with a degree in STEM, 27 percent are from historically black colleges. And remarkably, HBCUs have trained roughly 50 percent of black teachers.

They are also on the brink of disaster.

Rising college costs, the student loan crisis and federal budget cuts have broadly hamstrung higher education. But they’re killing HBCUs, where nearly three in five attendees are low-income, first-generation students and over 70 percent of students have limited financial resources. Fifteen of them have closed since 1997. Public and private HBCU endowments taken together are now roughly 70 percent smaller than those of non-HBCUs. And private historically black colleges saw a 42 percent decline in federal funding between 2003 and 2015. HBCUs are awarding fewer doctorates now than they did in 1977, and a report found that the six-year graduation rates at 20 HBCUs stood at 20 percent or lower in 2015.

While some marquee institutions with relatively large endowments, like Spelman College and Hampton University, face more common challenges, a large majority of HBCUs are facing existential threats and will need to be transformed, reinvigorated, to ensure that their futures are as vibrant as their pasts.

Things have changed several times over