The Thurgood Marshall College Fund’s Dr. N. Joyce Payne Research Center recently published a new report examining the research infrastructure, faculty capacity, and federal funding competitiveness at 47 historically Black colleges and universities and predominantly Black institutions across 22 states, Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Combined, the institutions included in the study secured at least $843 million in federal funding for research on an annual basis; however, this funding is highly concentrated among a handful of universities. The top seven institutions by funding level account for an estimated 50 percent of total federal research funding.
The authors identified several key barriers limiting the research capacity of the institutions included in their report. According to the authors, the most urgent crisis centers on research administration infrastructure. Some 87 percent of the analyzed institutions are operating with three or fewer pre-award full-time employees in their Offices of Sponsored Programs, resulting in minimal editorial support for grant proposals and a lack of support in identifying funding opportunities. Many campuses also have limited post-award staff capacity, suggesting many HBCUs and PBIs are not fully utilizing the funding they do secure. Furthermore, 93.6 percent of surveyed institutions report three or fewer full-time employees working in compliance.
Faculty time is a fundamental resource for research, yet many institutions included in the report require higher teaching loads than other universities. Over 87 percent of STEM faculty at the analyzed colleges and universities teach between six and eight courses per year. In contrast, STEM faculty at research-intensive universities have an average teaching load of three or four classes per year.
While the vast majority of the analyzed institutions have significant laboratory and research space, there are critical gaps in specialized instrumentation, high-performance computing, and facility modernization that have created barriers to competitiveness in high-priority research areas. Only 10.6 percent of these HBCUs and PBIs currently possess SCFI (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility) capabilities, which enable institutions to participate in defense-related research funding projects.
The authors also uncovered a high unmet demand for the National Science Foundation’s CREST (Centers of Research Excellence in Science and Technology) program. Roughly half of the surveyed institutions have applied for a CREST award and been denied — not due to weak research ideas, but due to a lack of proposal development infrastructure.
“This report demolishes the false choice between equity and excellence. These 47 institutions are already research powers — they are generating an $843 million annual return for the nation under conditions of chronic under-investment,” said M.C. Brown II, executive director and research scientist at the Payne Center. “The question is not whether HBCUs can produce rigorous science. They already do. The question is whether we — the research enterprise and the nation — will choose to invest in them as the strategic national assets they are.”
