HBCUs got a windfall of federal COVID relief. Here's how colleges are spending it
After a couple of difficult semesters during the pandemic, Elijah Love, a computer science major at North Carolina A&T State University (N.C. A&T), was determined to graduate on time.
"Whatever came with that — summer classes, double-load courses — I was willing to do it," Love says.
This summer, that meant continuing to take classes on top of teaching computer science to middle school girls and enrolling in a summer learning program at IBM.
He was prepared to pay for the extra summer credits, but then he got the bill: The classes were free. His school, a historically Black university, had used federal COVID relief funding to pay for the summer courses.
"I got right back on track," Love says. "I thought it was great. It was a great opportunity for the people struggling right now."
HBCUs have long been underfunded by federal and state governments. But this time, because of the way federal COVID relief money was allocated, these schools got a lot of it. For one thing, much of the funding targeted schools that serve more low-income students, which HBCUs do. And there was a whole other pot of money — $5.2 billion — just for HBCUs.
https://www.npr.org/2022/09/20/1124142614/how-hbcus-are-spending-their-covid-19-relief-money