HBCUs Get No Respect From College Ranking Organizations

by Al-Tony Gilmore

Two of America’s most respected publications, U.S. News & World Report and Forbes magazine, in 1983 and 2008 respectively, began listing their annual rankings of American institutions of higher education. There are other publications of college rankings, but those two have staked claims to being the gold standard and the most recognized and consulted.

The best colleges lists play a role for many high school students and parents in making one of the most consequential and important decisions of their lives. The elite and most endowed predominately White institutions (PWIs) anxiously await the reports, hoping for a high placement and the institutional eminence it sustains. The substantially good PWIs with sound academic reputations, mostly but not exclusively state sponsored schools – also find validation with high rankings and covet the status and prestige it brings. When their schools rise in the rankings it is a cause for celebration, and when they drop there is some dismay and disappointment.

Those who place the most value in the reports are those aligned with the nation’s wealthiest schools, and those who control the leading foundations and philanthropic organizations. For lower-tiered PWIs the rankings do not mean as much, though merely being referenced in the reports for many is seen as institutional validation for the students they serve.

HBCUs, over the decades of these reports, have resigned themselves to the inequitable low rankings they are assigned, which do not reflect the true value of most and are frustrating and defeating to a good number of elite and upper-tiered HBCUs who believe they are equal to if not better than many of the schools ranked above them. Those HBCUs do not claim or argue that they are better than the higher-ranked and relatively small number of Ivy League, upper-tiered and research schools. It is understood that the resource differentials are too large to overcome and cannot be ignored. The endowment of Harvard ($53.2 billion in 2025) and that of any other single Ivy League school, for example, is more than the combined endowments of all 107 HBCUs. But what causes angst and is perplexing for the upper tiered HBCUs are the number of PWIs ranked above them which are arguably of lesser caliber.

Actually, until U.S. News & World Report established the practice of ranking HBCUs among themselves – exclusive of PWIs but employing the same metrics – most of those schools did not entertain even the slightest hope or expectation of being included in the rankings. They were literally institutional analogies to Ralph Ellison’s book, Invisible Man. No matter the extent of their expansive accomplishments and contributions against odds imposed by race restrictions, they did not exist. The majority of HBCUs were not worthy of being compared with any PWI, regardless of status.

More recently, U.S. News & World Report has added more categories of American colleges into its annual report, resulting in more HBCUs being brought into the complex and complicated process of school rankings. And, while still seriously flawed in methodology, those efforts must be credited for making the reports more inclusive, credible, and sensitive to the unique differences between HBCUs and PWIs.

None of the reports, however, have come close to assessing the true value and quality of HBCUs because the measurements employed are biased against HBCUs and favorably inclined towards wealth and privilege. “Even though their quantitative data gives them the veneer of objectivity,” says Ethan Ris, of the University of Nevada-Reno and author of Other People’s Colleges: The Origins of American Higher Education Reform (University of Chicago Press, 2022), they are extraordinarily subjective. Before running the numbers the rankers have to decide which metrics signify ‘quality.’ These decisions affect the horse race at the top of the list, and they also determine who makes the list at all.”

The challenging purpose of the annual reports is to codify and affirm for college faculty, administrators, alumni, prospective students, philantrophies, funding agencies and institutions and the general public, which schools deliver the highest quality of education in ranking order. The nation’s most prestigious schools and alumni covet the highest rankings among national universities – defined as schools that offer a full range of undergraduate majors, plus masters and doctoral programs – highlighting that recognition in promotional literature targeted to prospective students, faculty, alumni, philantrophy, and placing it prominently in grant proposals.

It is no coincidence that those select schools have the nation’s largest endowments. Below the category of national universities, U. S. News & World Report includes separate categories: liberal arts colleges, regional colleges, top public schools, and HBCUs. Further, there are broad sub-categories of rankings including Best Undergraduate Teaching, First Year Experiences, and Social Mobility. In all of the categories, including ranking among themselves, HBCUs have been consistently shortchanged and inaccurately ranked. This owes itself to chronic misunderstandings of their missions, and an under-appreciation of their contributions, student accomplishments, and limited resources. Moreover, all of this has been compounded by the common denominator of flawed metrics.

Fundamentally, ranking colleges is not an exact science and has always employed methodologies and biased discretion favoring wealth and privilege – because both can be easily measured. This presents a neglected problem which has plagued the social sciences since its origins; we know those things we cannot measure with precision, therefore we make those things we can measure much more important than they really are. How do we measure self-confidence; the cultivation of race pride among the oppressed; sensitivity to and compassion for the disadvantaged; elevation of self-esteem; contributions to social movements; fugitives against the law of averages; commitments to democracy, fair play, the American idea and the belief that all persons are created equal?

Some schools make such things happen much more than others, but what efforts are made to measure and evaluate those impacts. The failure to address those questions in college rankings can be traced to the fault lines in the initial efforts at ranking American colleges, which had as much to do with eliminating and marginalizing schools – including but not limited to HBCUs – as it did with certifying the quality of others.

In 1906, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching , an agency devoted to higher education reform, published its first annual “Accepted List ” of U.S. colleges deemed worthy of receiving its grants. No HBCUs were on that list of 52 schools. It would be 1921 before a HBCU, Fisk University, would make the list. That same agency commissioned a report on the quality of medical schools in America, The Flexner Report, published in 1910, which called for sweeping changes in the training of physicians. Its recommendations led to the closure of 75 percent of U.S. medical schools, including five of the then seven Black medical schools. Only the Howard University School of Medicine and the Meharry Medical School survived.

In 1911, Kendric Babcock, a top official at the U.S. Bureau of Education, created an ambitious and contentious ratings system for more than 600 colleges which would judge “exactly the worth of degrees granted by the widely varying institutions in the United States.” Grouping the schools into four classes, two HBCUs – Howard and Fisk – made class III. Atlanta University and Atlanta Baptist (now Morehouse) made class IV. No other HBCUs were rated. Babcock described the colleges represented in class IV to be so sub-standard that their degrees were judged to be “two years behind peers from other places.”

At the time, many disgruntled PWIs opposed the rankings so bitterly that two American presidents ultimately intervened to bring a halt to the government publication. It was obvious that Babcock’s motive was to certify the schools of the wealthy and the privileged – the only schools to receive the Class I rating. It is important to reflect that in 1910 most U.S. colleges were in their first half century of existence, and the older established schools sought every opportunity to distinguish between their schools and the rising tide of the rest. College training had not been affordable or accessible to most Americans. Less than 3 percent of the U.S. population had a college degree in 1910, and just 14 percent had a high school diploma. For Blacks the percentages were far less.

Between then and 1967 when the report The American Negro College by esteemed Harvard sociologists Christopher Jencks and David Riesman, was published, a small number but increasing number of HBCUs without “official” college ratings or rankings – though accredited – rose to the top as high-tiered Black higher education institutions in segregated America. Boasting visionary presidents, good students, strong integrated faculties, vigorous liberal arts curricula, and large numbers of exceptional alumni – many of whom received graduate and professional degrees from the nation’s most prestigious PWIs – those schools garnered approval, academic respect and standing in Black communities. Among them were Howard, Fisk, Hampton, Talladega, Bennett, Morehouse, Tuskegee, Wilberforce, Shaw, Spelman, Dillard, Lincoln of Pennsylvania, West Virginia State and Atlanta University. Tuskegee – the highest profiled HBCU of late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – sustained a good reputation during this period, but its emphasis on industrial education was transitioning to a more liberal arts focus, especially following the death of its founder Booker T. Washington in 1915.

Interestingly, many of those HBCUs had White presidents and large numbers of White board members until the 1920s when the “New Negro” college students demanded Black leadership – changes that would continue through the early 1950’s when Hampton, Spelman, and Talledega were the last to appoint their first Black presidents. Many of the foundations and philanthropies had been more comfortable providing financial assistance to HBCUs with White leadership and some Blacks believed degrees from such institutions were more credible with potential White employers. Those elite schools also had the largest share of students who came from Black professional, middle-class and second generation or more of college trained families, and were generally appraised as being a cut-above other HBCUs.

One of the unmeasurable intangibles for graduates from those institutions was the social capital they transferred to life among Black people. But despite what those HBCU’s and others accomplished, The American Negro College report lumped them into one category: “Academic Disaster Areas.” That report plunged many into financial crises, placing more than a few in precarious positions from which a number have yet to fully recover and contributed to the closure of some. Also, integration and affirmative action caused a drain or disproportionate sharing of the best Black administrators, faculty, and students to PWIs. Moreover, that report, published in the Harvard Educational Review, confirmed the predispositions of many that higher education institutions operated and administered predominately by Blacks and for Black students were not to be compared in quality to PWIs, either the elite schools for the wealthy and advantaged, or those public schools for lower and average income Whites and those of lower social and economic status.

The report rated only a handful of HBCUs, who they termed “the elite of the Negro academic world” – Fisk, Morehouse, Spelman, Hampton, Howard, Tuskegee, Dillard, Texas Southern and Morgan State – as exceptions to the status of inferiority, though none were considered comparable to any of the better or middle-of-the-road PWIs. Otherwise, it was a one-size-fits-all indictment of over 95 percent of HBCUs. And because the timing of the release of the report coincided with PWIs raiding HBCUs for their best Black faculty, and their admission of Black applicants in larger numbers – where either none or few had ever been enrolled – the public perception of the quality of HBCUs suffered more, even among increasing numbers of Blacks.

It is against the enduring and stressful shadow of this historical backdrop that HBCUs in college rankings such as U.S. News & World Report and Forbes is best understood and analyzed. Since 1906 the measurements have never been designed to fairly evaluate HBCUs. There was another purpose, one that was not specifically focused on HBCUs. They were designed to make clear distinctions between schools for the wealthy and privileged and those PWIs who educated students without those backgrounds, and to establish criteria for continuing funding of the “best” and the marginalization or elimination of the others.

U.S. News & World Report 2025

In the U.S. News & World Report‘s 2025 Best Colleges rankings, 1,500 four-year bachelor’s degree-granting institutions were evaluated. Those institutions are grouped within 10 distinct rankings, with National Universities, National Liberal Arts Colleges, Regional Universities, and Regional Colleges being the main categories.

There are 17 ranking factors with an intricate system of weights assigned to each: graduation rates, first year retention rates, graduation rate performance, Pell graduation rates, Pell graduation performance, first-generation graduation rates, first-generation graduation rate performance, college graduates earning more than a high school graduate, financial resources per student, borrower debt, faculty salaries, full-time faculty, student-faculty ratio, standardized test scores, citations per publication, field-weighted citation impact, and publication share in the top five percent of journals.

Without elaboration, at least half of those factors are either anchored in wealth or are culturally biased, placing HBCUs at a decided disadvantage that cannnot be overcome. Thus, the dispiriting results are misleading and easily misunderstood by those unfamiliar with the ranking factors. Howard University ranked 86th nationally. No other HBCU was in the top 150.

National Liberal Arts Colleges are defined as schools which focus almost exclusively on undergraduate education and award at least 50 percent of their degrees in arts and sciences. To be be considered for a ranking the schools were required to have regional accreditation, be designated as a bachelor’s degree granting institution in Carnegie’s Basic Classification but not designated as a highly specialized school, enroll at least 100 students, have financial expenditure data available in the U.S. Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Data System, have a six-year bachelor’s degree graduation rate and is currently accepting new applicants for first-year and first-time bachelor’s degree-seeking students. The rankings were determined by a number of differently weighted factors, including graduation and retention rates, faculty quality, student selectivity, financial resources, assessments by other colleges and high school guidance counselors and alumni giving.

There were 211 colleges ranked and only two HBCUs made the list: Spelman College was ranked 40th and Morehouse was 95th. To suggest that only two HBCUs qualified for the list of over 200 schools leaves more questions than answers. No doubt Spelman and Morehouse have more name recognition with “other” colleges and high school guidance counselors than comparatively positioned HBCUs, and clearly that is what’s reflected in the final tabulations. The exclusion of Hampton, Xavier, Tougaloo, Claflin, Livingstone, Johnson C. Smith and several other HBCUs points to the deficiencies in the metrics.

Forbes College Rankings 2025

To begin the compilation of its list, Forbes compiled a list of thousands of U.S. colleges that educate undergraduates according to their Carnegie Classification – a higher education framework which categorizes institutions based on the types of degrees they offer, their research output and speciality focus. The list includes doctoral research universities, master’s universities, and schools that offer specialized programs in engineering, business and art. Each of those schools were evaluated with data from two federal education databases (the Integrated Post Secondary Education Data System and College Scorecard.)

From these schools Forbes selected a final 500. Colleges were ranked based on the following weighted measures: alumni salary (20%); student debt (15%); graduation rate (15%); Forbes‘ own constructed list of American leaders and the schools they attended (15%); return on investment (15%); retention rate (10%) and academic success (10%). Using this methodology, only six HBCUs made the list. Howard was the top-ranked HBCU at
#273.

It is an understatement to claim that those rankings are disheartening, and is reasonable to insist that they could not be otherwise considering the measures used to make those determinations. But to rank these elite schools at such low levels is absurd. It is not an exaggeration to say that Forbes satirizes the whole idea of college rankings.

As for the methodology, it is no secret that HBCU graduates are disproportionately represented in the best paying jobs requiring college degrees. Most HBCU students are from lower income brackets than PWI students, and need more financial assistance to attend college. Graduate rates at HBCUs are a reflection of the backgrounds of the students they enroll. “I want Harvard or Yale to go get a student from the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans, that’s gone to subpar elementary, middle and high schools and graduate them in four years,” argues Walter Kimbrough, who has been serving as interim president of Talladega College.

Return on investment is based on a formula which attempts to calculate the costs associated with earning a college degree and the post-enrollment earnings of the graduates compared to the typical salary of a high school graduate in their state. HBCU graduates indeed have better earnings than Black high school graduates, though that margin of income narrows when compared to White high school graduates. By comparison, White graduates of PWIs have a wider salary differential than their high school graduate counterparts.

Retention rates were measured by the percentage of students who choose to stay after their first year, which Forbes maintains is a way to account for student satisfaction. Perhaps it is, but many highly satisfied students at HBCUs of their choice do not return for reasons that have nothing to do with satisfaction and everything to do with finances.

Academic success is defined by Forbes by the number of recent graduates who have won esteemed scholarships and those who have gone on to earn a Ph.D. To be be sure, most of those achievements go to graduates from prestigious institutions, but over the past decade or so there have been deliberate efforts to expand these opportunities to HBCU students.

The Fulbright program of the U.S. State Department, for example, has a HBCU Institutional Leaders program which engages 19 HBCUs, sending recent graduates, graduate students, faculty, and administrators overseas to study, teach, conduct research, or participate in seminars abroad. Thus, of the seven weighted measures, only that of academic success , weighted at only 10 percent, allows HBCUs to be measured by a standard that does not discriminate as lamentably as the other six. While not the norm for HBCUs or most PWIs , Howard University, for example, has produced four Rhodes Scholars, 11 Truman Scholars, two Marshall Scholars, two Schwarzman Scholars, 22 Pickering Fellows, and 70 Fulbright Scholars. North Carolina Central University – while not on the Forbes list – has for years produced more students who go on to earn Ph.Ds than any other HBCU or PWI of it size and resources.

Neither the U.S. News & World Report or the Forbes rankings have been fair to HBCUs because their definition of what constitutes a quality education rewards reputations and traditions built on wealth and exclusivity. HBCUs do not have wealth but consistently over-perform in producing high quality graduates from disadvantaged and low income backgrounds. They also have produced the largest number of Black graduates who have had profound impacts in the pursuit of social justice. They have been chronically sidelined by much of America and academia. Their reputations are best known by the Black community and those who have probed enough to be informed of their contributions.

The opinions of peers – presidents, admissions deans and provosts of PWIs – are opinions of people who, by and large are asked to “rank something they know nothing about” argues Walter Kimbrough. Of all the categories of schools ranked in these reports, HBCUs are the least to benefit but the outcry against the reports has been muted. Those who were ranked among the best of HBCUs, and even those listed with the appallingly low rankings among PWIs frequently cite those rankings on the front pages of their websites.

Even the United Negro College Fund – who interestingly made Forbes list of America’s Top 100 Charities – has been surprisingly quiet on the rankings. It is as if they are in agreement with the rankings which are derived from a methodology that is not designed to credit the unique strengths of the schools it represents. It is a methodology that was not created with HBCUs in mind, but one with the intent of validating the superiority of the nation’s wealthiest schools and justifying the academic distance between those elite schools and the rest. And at the same time, it is a methodology that is unprepared and not inclined to rate any of the best HBCUs schools above PWIs of markedly lesser achievement. More than a century ago, it was arbitrarily decided what constituted quality in American colleges, and not much has changed. The fundamentals of the scorecard of 1906 are no different than the scorecard of 2025.

Dr. Al-Tony Gilmore is Distinguished Historian Emeritus of the National Education Association. He has served as a history professor at Howard University, University of Maryland at College Park, and a visiting scholar at George Washington University. He has written widely on HBCUs, and is the author of several scholarly books including Revisiting The Slave Community (Greenwood Press,1978), All the People: NEA’s Legacy of Inclusion and Its Minority Presidents (National Education Association, 2008); A More Perfect Union: The Merger of the South Carolina Education Association and the Palmetto Education Association (National Education Association, 2012) and the seminal book on the intersection of sports and society, Bad Nigger: The National Impact of Jack Johnson (Kennikat Press, 1975). His articles, reviews and commentaries have appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, New Republic, Huffington Post, American Scholar, Commentary and in the leading historical journals. He established the Al-Tony Gilmore Endowed Scholarship at North Carolina Central University, where the Conference Room in the department of history is named in his honor.