New Report Finds Low Share of R&D Funds Goes to HBCUs

A new report from the Center for American Progress and the Thurgood Marshall College Fund shows that historically Black colleges and universities receive a disproportionately low percentage of federal research and development funding.

While HBCUs make up roughly 3 percent of all four-year higher ed institutions, they’ve received less than 3 percent of R&D funding since at least 2010, according to the report. In recent years, between 2018 and 2023, they were awarded less than 1 percent of R&D expenditures.

Some agencies have given HBCUs a relatively high proportion of R&D funding, including the Department of Education, the Small Business Administration and the Department of Agriculture, which has required allotments for land-grant HBCUs. But the two federal agencies that award the most R&D funding annually, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Defense, have doled out especially low shares of those funds to HBCUs; in 2023, they awarded 0.54 percent and 0.40 percent, respectively. Meanwhile, 17 of the 43 federal agencies that supply research funding didn’t give HBCUs any R&D funds at all that year.

Sara Partridge, associate director of higher education policy at CAP and co-author of the report, said both Republicans and Democrats have sought to address inequities in R&D funding, but their efforts have been insufficient.

“In order to support these key drivers of scientific achievement and upward mobility, we need federal policymakers to commit to measurable benchmarks for the share of funds awarded to these institutions,” she said in a press release.