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The rising cost of college has many students asking whether or not a degree is still worth it. For many Black students, those calculations are increasingly focused on Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Overall, HBCUs saw , while other schools saw declines for Black students following the Supreme Court’s decision banning affirmative action in 2023, Inside Higher Ed reports.

HBCUs have long provided critical access to education for Black students who were historically excluded from other colleges. Today, many of them are known for offering strong education outcomes, campus communities, alumni networks, and other resources for their students.

Because factors such as the and where HBCUs are located tend to negatively impact alumni salaries, it makes it difficult to compare alumni earnings to those of other colleges, particularly PWIs in New England and on the West Coast where cost of living and median salaries are higher.

This study explores how HBCUs offer students a strong return on their education investment, both through traditional on-campus programs and increasingly through online options.

Best HBCUs for ROI Overall

When students calculate the value of a college degree, they look at three things: How much they actually paid for college, how much of their paycheck will go toward loan payments, and how much they’ll have left each month to pay rent and other living expenses. In our ROI calculations, we considered those three things: 

Bang For Your Buck: HBCUs With The Highest ROIs

The list of the top HBCUs for ROI might be surprising, as some of the biggest university names known for high alumni salaries are missing. That may be due in part to the high price tag that comes with some private HBCUs.

Every school on the list is a public university with the exception of Howard University, Kamala Harris’ alma mater in Washington, D.C. and Hampton University in Virginia. These findings highlight the strong role public HBCUs play in boosting economic mobility for Black students.

Many of these colleges are also located near Baltimore and Washington, D.C., an area that has a high Black population and tends to offer well-paying jobs to those with a college degree (along with a high cost of living).

The average alumni of these colleges would take home between $476,000 and $573,000 in the 10 years after they graduated.

Balancing Graduate Debt and Earnings

Some HBCUs are more effective in balancing graduate debt with strong earnings outcomes, which can help alleviate student debt for Black students. While the Standard Repayment Plan for federal student loans uses a 10-year repayment plan, that’s a long way down the road for most college students. In the first few years out of college, how much a student owes versus how much they’re making can seem overwhelming, especially when debt is high.

For HBCU students, median debt at graduation ranged from $23,000 to $34,000, while median alumni earnings in the first year out of college varied widely, from just $13,000 to $53,000. The following colleges have the best debt-to-salary ratio for recent graduates, potentially freeing up more of graduates’ monthly paychecks or allowing them to put more toward their payment each month. Although students of these colleges may graduate with more in student loans than those from other HBCUs, they also tend to see higher salary payoffs comparatively.

Once graduates get a few years of experience in the workforce with their new degree, they typically see higher salaries. Five years after graduation, median salaries for HBCU graduates ranged from $25,000 to $65,000, making it easier for most graduates to put money aside or pay down loans. 

Schools With The Best Debt-to-Salary Ratio For Fifth-Year Salaries

First-Year Post-Graduation Earnings: Immediate ROI

Some students are most interested in how much they will earn straight out of college and which schools will give them the highest payoff out of the gate. The following HBCUs provide the strongest immediate financial outcomes for graduates, which can be relevant for students concerned about short-term financial stability.

Top HBCUs for First-Year Salary

The Impact of Smaller HBCUs on Long-Term Success

While big-name HBCUs often dominate in rankings and salary outcomes, many smaller HBCUs fly under the radar but still offer excellent long-term ROI. These HBCUs are lesser-known than top colleges, such as Howard or Spelman. They serve student bodies of less than 3,000 students but still offer higher median salaries compared to many other universities.

Small HBCUs With The Best Alumni Salaries

This list includes a mix of private and public universities stretching from Pennsylvania all the way to Texas. 

While HBCU salaries tend to be negatively impacted by location – many are located in Southern states with a lower cost of living and lower overall salaries as a result – the states represented on this list vary widely in cost of living and median salaries overall, highlighting the strength of alumni earnings from those colleges.

Although alumni of these schools don’t always start off with strong first-year earnings, their graduates all tend to earn higher median salaries by the fifth year than graduates of other HBCUs.

The Role of Online Programs in Enhancing Accessibility and Earnings

Like many other colleges and universities, HBCUs are expanding their distance education offerings to improve accessibility and provide more options for students. While most HBCUs offer online classes, one in three offer fully online degree programs for undergraduates, and 52 (about half of universities) offer fully online graduate programs. The following HBCUs have the highest rate of students taking at least some online classes.

HBCUs With The Highest Rate of Students in Online Classes

The average median first-year salary for HBCU graduates overall is nearly $32,500, and more than $44,500 for alumni five years out. For colleges with online programs, those salaries are actually higher. 

Average median alumni salaries for first-year graduates at schools with online programs were about $34,250. Five years after graduation, salaries climbed to an average median of about $47,300. 

This could be due to a number of factors, including which types of schools have the resources or student interest to adopt online learning methods and how well schools were able to respond during the pandemic. 

Bottom Line

HBCUs from Texas to Pennsylvania are providing strong ROI for Black students through a combination of earnings growth, manageable debt, and increasingly accessible online programs.

For many students, the draw of attending an HBCU is the campus community, which also may make some schools less likely to adopt online programs. However, some students can’t attend on campus due to factors like working full-time, supporting a family, or living too far away from campus. Expanding online offerings can help increase accessibility for Black students who still want to gain the benefits of attending an HBCU without taking a pay cut or spending less time with family.

Methodology

This study used data from the U.S. Department of Education, including data from and . College Scorecard data is from the Most Recent Institutional Data (2022-2023) release. It includes median debt at graduation, median debt for all students when their loans entered repayment (whether they graduated or not), and median alumni salaries for one and five years after graduation.

For our ROI calculation, we estimated total median earnings 10 years after completion based on the median five-year earnings for alumni. We then calculated how much student loans would cost using the median debt for borrowers when their loans entered repayment and assuming the loan is paid off in 10 years with a 6.53% interest rate (the current federal interest rate for undergraduate direct student loans). We calculated average net cost by multiplying the average net price by four years and adding the total amount of interest a student would pay. We then subtracted this from the total estimated earnings over 10 years. 

One limitation of this method is that median debt includes students who did not finish their degree. However, it allowed us to include more schools in our study, as many HBCUs did not have data on debt specifically for those who graduated.

Enrollment rates, data on which schools offer online degrees, and the percent of students enrolled in distance education classes all came from IPEDS for the 2022-23 school year.

To find out which smaller and lesser-known HBCUs had the best alumni salaries, we removed the following schools from our dataset: Morehouse College, Spelman College, Howard University, Hampton University, Tuskegee University, Florida A&M University, |North Carolina A&T State University, Clark Atlanta University, Jackson State University, Texas Southern University, Alabama State University, Grambling State University, Morgan State University, and Xavier University of Louisiana.