This week, Bloomberg Philanthropies announced a $600 million donation to the nation’s four historically Black medical schools. These will, of course, be important gifts for the schools. In the wider philanthrosphere, they may also be a sign that HBCUs are finally gaining the momentum they need to close the fundraising gap that has resulted in average endowments far behind the nation’s major, predominantly white institutions.
This year, as in most years, we’ve seen mega gifts to universities, including at the eye-popping billion-dollar level. Historically, these donations have most often come from super-successful business people giving back to their alma maters – as Mike Bloomberg has done for the school he attended, Johns Hopkins. While laudable, the flip side of such mega gifts has been to further stretch the wealth gap between a handful of elite and well-endowed institutions (looking at you, Harvard) and the hundreds of public and not-so-wealthy colleges and universities that struggle with finances as they educate the great majority of students.
These disparities are particularly evident for HBCUs, vital institutions which have nevertheless struggled to attract transformative donations of the sort that go regularly to major, predominantly white institutions. Recent data has shown that endowments of private PWIs are on average seven times greater per full-time equivalent student than at HBCUs, and that the figure for public PWI endowments stands at three times that of public HBCUs.
Hopefully, the newest major higher-ed gift from Bloomberg Philanthropies is an indication that things are changing. Bloomberg’s commitment of $600 million to the country’s four historically Black medical schools comes out of Bloomberg’s Greenwood Initiative, a four-year-old program launched to reverse centuries of underinvestment in Black educational and other institutions and to build Black wealth and generational wealth.
The funding is the latest step in the initiative’s long-term strategy to support equity in higher ed for Black students, one that has involved these same historically Black schools. In 2020, Bloomberg gave $100 million to reduce debt of students at the four medical schools, intended to enable more Black students to attend, complete their training and ultimately serve the healthcare needs of Black communities, which experience higher rates of illness and shorter average lifespans than the broader population.
“By lessening the debt load, the first $100 million gift gave them more agency and choice where to practice, and raised graduation rates in those medical schools,” said Garnesha Ezediaro, who leads the Greenwood Initiative. That earlier donation led to another benefit, one that all philanthropists hope for: It helped the medical schools boost their fundraising success from other sources several times over, from $29 million in the year before the Greenwood Initiative commitment to $350 million in the years since.
“When Black people are treated by Black doctors, they receive more preventive care”
This latest $600 million commitment breaks down across the schools this way: $175 million apiece will go to Howard University College of Medicine, Meharry Medical College and Morehouse School of Medicine. Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science will receive $75 million. It’s the largest-ever gift to these medical schools. Bloomberg also announced a donation of $5 million to start up a new medical school committed to boosting racial diversity among physicians: the Xavier Ochsner College of Medicine.
The funds should indeed be transformative for these institutions, and will more than double the endowments of three of the four institutions. The money is to be used to strengthen their financial stability, control tuition costs, and fund research and basic operations, Ezediaro said.
The need for improved access to primary care physicians and preventative healthcare is clearly evident in the country’s Black population, which in recent years suffered worse outcomes during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic than the population at large, but which for centuries has experienced health disparities. “Data has shown that Black people are more likely to die at every stage of life, but that when Black people are treated by Black doctors, they receive more preventive care,” Ezediaro said.
A big month for Bloomberg higher ed giving
This new announcement comes just a few weeks after Bloomberg Philanthropies committed a headline-grabbing $1 billion to Johns Hopkins University, Michael Bloomberg’s alma mater, and an institution to which he’d already donated literally billions, including $1.8 billion in 2018 for financial aid. This month’s billion-dollar gift was specifically for medical school tuition: It will make tuition free to most students at the medical school and will also boost financial aid for the university’s schools of nursing, public health and other grad programs.
Like Bloomberg’s latest HBCU commitment, the $1 billion gift was designed to increase the number of qualified, lower-income students entering medical school by defraying the high cost of tuition. So while it did go to an elite PWI, there was a distinct equity component there. And by this point, Bloomberg’s support of HBCUs pretty effectively mitigates the criticism that his multibillion-dollar patronage has been overly focused on his alma mater to the exclusion of other less-well-resourced institutions.
Bloomberg’s also tackling a real problem for rising medical professionals: sky-high medical school debt burdens a large percentage of aspiring physicians from lower-income backgrounds, regardless of color, sometimes driving them to give up medical school. Even for those who finish their training, the need to pay off potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in school loans often steers them into higher-paying specialties. That leaves too few doctors for primary care and other necessary but lower-paying specialties that have the greatest potential for improving community health.
Fortunately, some higher ed mega-donors are getting the memo. In February, I wrote about another $1 billion donation to cover tuition costs for med students. That gift, to the Albert Einstein School of Medicine, in New York, came from philanthropist Ruth Gottesman, a former professor at the school and widow of billionaire investor David S. Gottesman.
Paradigm shift underway?
This latest big Bloomberg gift may be yet another signal that megadonors are getting the memo on HBCUs. Recently, in conjunction with Gregory Gerami’s mega-gift-that-wasn’t to Florida A&M, IP’s Ade Adeniji discussed the historical and structural inequities in philanthropic giving for higher education and HBCUs, and how the wealth gap between Black and white America has perpetuated that. Perhaps the broader hope with Bloomberg’s latest gift — beyond the benefits to the four medical schools, the students that attend them and the patients they care for — is that more funders of every color will see the value of supporting HBCUs, rather than schools that already have multibillion-dollar endowments. The need is only increased by the attacks in recent years directed at affirmative action and DEI efforts.
We’ve been seeing some positive signs: Back in January, IP’s Mike Scutari noted that while giving to HBCUs has historically lagged far behind donations to predominantly white institutions, a paradigm shift within philanthropy has likely begun, with more philanthropic givers – including uber-rich non-alums – seeing the importance of supporting HBCUs and possibly prompting others to follow. We have to mention, for instance, the $800 million or more that Mackenzie Scott has been directing to HBCUs and other underfunded colleges and universities since 2020.
It’s quite possible that the next U.S. president will be an HBCU graduate – Democratic candidate Kamala Harris is a Howard University alum. Hopefully, that will also help further raise awareness within the philanthropic sector and prompt more funding.
