Page 4 - Second Morrill Act News Today

The U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Agriculture recently informed governors of 16 states – including Oklahoma – that their land-grant Historical Black Colleges and Universities had

Their message was clear: they want the state to give back $2.1 billion that the federal government said the state owed.

Students are frustrated after federal agencies reported that Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) around the nation were underfunded by billions of dollars.

Biden administration urges states to rectify funding gap for historically Black land-grant universities, highlighting underfunding in Tennessee.

South Carolina leaders have underfunded the university for decades, the U.S. Department of Education claimed in a letter to Gov. Henry McMaster.

Because of travel, Gov. Bill Lee said he hadn't been able to receive a letter yet from the federal government outlining a funding discrepancy to the tune of $2.1 billion for TSU.

Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders was one of 16 governors nationwide to receive a letter urging states to rectify the disparity in funding between land-grant Historically Black Colleges and Universities and their non-HBCU land-grant peers.

The letter from U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona and U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Thomas Vilsack addressed the “ongoing underinvestment in West Virginia State University” compared to the state’s other land-grant university.

LSU and Southern University are both land-grant institutions, but its no secret that LSU has been far better funded than Southern.

Drawing on data from the National Center for Education Statistics from 1987 to 2020, the departments calculated the amount these institutions would have received if their state funding per student equaled that of 1862 institutions. Officials said the discrepancies in appropriated funding ranged from $172 million to $2.1 billion, creating significant financial disparities.