Forbes Ranks the Best HBCUs. The More Important Question Is What ALL HBCUs Do.
Cheryl P. Talley, Rihana S. Mason, and Jon Grahe

Abstract

Forbes just published its first-ever ranking devoted exclusively to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and it is genuinely good news. For the first time, a major national publication has recognized that HBCUs deserve to be evaluated on their own terms rather than buried in a list dominated by institutions with endowments twenty times their size. Howard University leads the private schools. North Carolina A&T tops the public list. Twenty institutions are named, celebrated, and given the visibility they have long earned.

We celebrate this too. But when we looked closer at the HBCUs that move the most families out of poverty, the picture looked different.
Rankings by definition create hierarchies of winners and losers, like the top-20 and everyone else. The Forbes methodology, which draws on alumni earnings, graduation rates, student debt, and return on investment, captures something real and useful for prospective students choosing between schools. But it also, inevitably, rewards institutions that serve students who were already more likely to succeed. Students from higher-income families, from better-resourced high schools and from communities with more social capital start with an advantage. By that logic, a ranking is at least partly a measure of who a school admits, not only of what it does for them.
There is a different question worth asking. Not which individual HBCU produces the best individual outcomes, but what the category of HBCUs produce. This would include the remainder of schools not listed in the top 20 that have served families and communities across generations. We recently completed research that speaks directly to that question. The findings reframe the Forbes story in ways that matter for policymakers, funders, and anyone who cares about closing America’s generational wealth gap.

Our analysis applied the intergenerational mobility framework developed by Raj Chetty, a Harvard economist and founding director of Opportunity Insights. Chetty’s team drew on national income tax and census data to track the earnings of more than 30 million college attendees from 1999 to 2013, producing one of the largest and most rigorous studies of economic mobility ever conducted in the United States. We extended the analysis to compare HBCU and non-HBCU institutions on a single measure: what fraction of students from families in the bottom income quintile ultimately reach the top quintile as adults? By that measure, HBCUs significantly outperform non-HBCU institutions, including those ranked far above them in traditional prestige hierarchies.

Chetty’s dataset revealed that HBCU students came from families with substantially lower median incomes than their non-HBCU peers — $46,580 versus $78,527. Yet, despite starting from a lower baseline, HBCU graduates narrow the earnings gap between their parents by roughly 68% more than their non-HBCU peers do. When you compare students from similar family income levels, HBCU attendance is associated with $5,784 higher median child earnings than non-HBCU attendees. This advantage holds even when comparing HBCUs to non-HBCUs within the same institutional selectivity tier. HBCUs in the selective public and selective private tiers show mobility rates of 3.05%, outperforming even highly selective public institutions at 2.81%. To put that in plain terms: a mobility rate measures the percentage of students who grew up in low-income families and ended up in high-income ones as adults. By that measure, even those HBCUs that would never appear on a prestige ranking are doing a better job in moving families up the economic ladder than institutions with far greater resources.

These findings are correlational, not causal — we cannot say with certainty that attending an HBCU produces this mobility advantage. Something else correlated with HBCU attendance may explain it. However, the pattern is consistent, statistically significant, and holds up across multiple analytical approaches. At minimum, something is happening at HBCUs that deserves far more rigorous investigation than it has received.
The Forbes ranking, to its credit, acknowledges the resource constraints under which many HBCUs operate. It notes that relatively low graduation and retention rates hurt HBCU ratings. It correctly identifies financial challenges that many students face as a contributing factor to lower graduation rates. What it cannot do is show what those graduation rates look like when you account for the economic starting point of the students those institutions are serving. The institutions Forbes ranks lowest may actually be doing the hardest work of all: serving students from the most economically precarious backgrounds, with the fewest resources, and still moving the needle on generational poverty in ways that no individual earnings metric can capture.

This is not an argument against the Forbes ranking, which answers the question of which HBCUs produce the best outcomes for students who were already positioned to succeed. Instead, we ask which institutions are doing the most, relative to their resources and their students’ starting points, to close the generational wealth gap. By that measure, the evidence suggests that ALL HBCUs as a category — not just the top 20 — succeed at what they do. It also suggests that HBCUs deserve substantially more public investment than they currently receive.

Forbes has done something valuable by giving HBCUs their own list. The next step is to give them the right list; one aimed at fostering a unifying narrative across the ecosystem of institutions. Let’s measure not just which graduates earn the most but which institutions move the most families out of poverty. Such a ranking would help policymakers fund those institutions accordingly and provide a message more worthy of discussion.

Cheryl P. Talley, Rihana S. Mason, and Jon Grahe are the editors of Scalable STEM Interventions at HBCUs: Theory and Practice for Lasting Change (Routledge, 2027). The mobility findings cited here are drawn from Chapter 13 of that volume, authored by Tom McKlin, Malik B. Malik, and Cheryl P. Talley.

Editor’s Notes

1. Forbes ranking context. In August 2026, Forbes published Asia Alexander’s first Forbes ranking devoted exclusively to HBCUs, naming 10 private and 10 public institutions. Forbes states that the ranking draws on measures of student outcomes and return on investment, including earnings, graduation, debt, retention, outcomes for Pell Grant recipients, and leadership indicators. The present article uses that ranking as a point of departure rather than reproducing or modifying Forbes’ methodology.
2. Distinct mobility framework. The authors apply a separate intergenerational-mobility lens derived from Raj Chetty, John N. Friedman, Emmanuel Saez, Nicholas Turner, and Danny Yagan’s Mobility Report Cards research. That work uses deidentified federal tax data to construct college-level statistics on parental income and students’ adult earnings. Opportunity Insights provides the underlying college-level data and replication materials.
3. Attribution of HBCU-specific findings. The numerical comparisons in this article concerning HBCU and non-HBCU parental income, adult earnings, mobility rates, selectivity tiers, statistical significance, and the reported $5,784 earnings difference are the authors’ analysis and interpretation of the underlying mobility data. They should not be attributed to Forbes, Asia Alexander, Chetty and colleagues, Opportunity Insights, or UWP unless independently reported by those sources. UWP has preserved the authors’ explicit caution that these findings are correlational rather than causal.
4. Forthcoming volume. The authors identify Scalable STEM Interventions at HBCUs: Theory and Practice for Lasting Change as a forthcoming Routledge volume (2027) and state that the mobility findings are developed in Chapter 13 by Tom McKlin, Malik B. Malik, and Cheryl P. Talley. This forthcoming-publication information is supplied by the authors. At the time of this editorial preparation, a public Routledge title page was not located, so the manuscript links only to the publisher’s official site rather than to an unverified title URL.

References
Alexander, A. (2026, August 1; updated August 25). Top HBCUs: 20 Historically Black Colleges That Set Grads Up For Success. Forbes.
Whitford, E. (2025, August 26). How We Rank America’s Best Colleges. Forbes.
Chetty, R., Friedman, J. N., Saez, E., Turner, N., & Yagan, D. (2020). Income Segregation and Intergenerational Mobility Across Colleges in the United States. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 135(3), 1567–1633. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjaa005
Opportunity Insights. Mobility Report Cards: Income Segregation and Intergenerational Mobility Across Colleges in the United States.
Opportunity Insights. Data: Mobility Report Cards college-level datasets and replication materials.
U.S. Department of Education, White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities. What is an HBCU?
Howard University. Official university website.
North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. Official university website.
Routledge. Official publisher website. Forthcoming volume metadata in this manuscript is author-supplied.