FAMU among HBCUs with more Black students than all 8 Ivy League institutions combined

This past academic school year, the eight Ivy League institutions – Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Penn, Columbia, Brown, Dartmouth, and Cornell – enrolled a total of 68,968 undergraduate students — only 5,063 of them were Black. This past fall FAMU, enrolled 5,885 Black undergrads, more Black undergrads than all eight Ivies put together.

Howard, Morgan State, North Carolina A&T, Prairie View, Southern, and Tennessee State are six other individual HBCUs at which Black undergraduate enrollments exceed the cumulative sum of Black bachelor’s degree seekers across the Ivies.

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on Affirmative Action dealt a devastating blow to Harvard and other highly-selective institutions that compete for top students of color. Now that race-conscious admissions policies and practices have been deemed unlawful, highly-selective schools like Stanford, MIT, University of Chicago, Duke, Northwestern, and the Ivies are at risk of having even fewer Black students in future cohorts.  

U.S. News & World Report (USNWR) consistently ranks the Ivies and among its Top 50 National Universities.  In 2022 USNWR ranked FAMU No. 202 out of the 443 "national universities". In all, there are nearly 4,000 college/universities in the nation.  FAMU ranked No. 103 among top public universities.

Beat the Ivies

For nearly 10 years, under former President Fredrick Humphries, FAMU upended academic norms by out recruiting the Ivies for the best and brightest Black students by attracting more National Achievement Scholars. FAMU led the nation in the recruitment of these scholars outpacing Harvard, Yale, and Stanford in 1992, 1995, 1997, and tying Harvard in 2000.   

Since they were first established in the mid-1800s, HBCUs have always extended college access to talented Black students whom the Ivies and other predominantly white institutions (PWIs) systematically overlook. To be sure, HBCUs aren’t second-choice schools filled with Black students that other institutions didn’t want. For at least five decades now, most HBCU students could’ve attended PWIs, but intentionally chose to spend their undergraduate years in identity-affirming, culturally-inclusive educational environments. 

Unlike most PWIs, (especially highly-selective places like the Ivies), HBCUs have always wanted Black students and they’ve admitted them without discriminating against applicants from other racial groups.