I know exactly the soaring anticipation that Howard University’s roughly 2,500 incoming first-year students have been feeling since the first notice of their acceptance letters. There were high school graduation parties decorated in the school’s indigo, red and white colors. Parents beaming to their neighbors about upcoming send-offs to the country’s most recognizable historically Black college or university (HBCU). Located in Washington DC, Howard is nicknamed “The Mecca” by its devoted alumni because it boasts a who’s-who of graduates who pioneered every era of Black history since the school’s 1867 founding.

I know the inextinguishable excitement these recently admitted students are feeling because when I arrived wide-eyed at Spelman College in the heart of Atlanta’s HBCU epicenter, I was enveloped in instant amity, greeted with overdue affirmation and welcomed into an institution designed to nurture the promise of the young, gifted and Black. Inside the verdant urban oasis of my little Black college, I felt airlifted from countless racist indignities I endured prior. An immediate awareness dawned on me that this was how white people must feel about America, in that they never have to question if all of this was made for them.

That excitement and anticipation is also the reason my heart breaks for the 502 inbound Howard students, roughly 20% of the class, who were notified just days ago, and only weeks out from the 11 August move-in date, that they had been disenrolled due to missed tuition payments. Even though dozens of students were readmitted on 27 July, the move still leaves hundreds of students stunned that their dreams of attending one of the country’s premier Black colleges were so suddenly dashed. Many of the affected have taken to social media to grieve the disappointment.

For millions of young people, the narrow window to solidify next steps after high school is far more consequential to their lives than what diplomas they can frame. Fledgling adults who social scientists term Neets (not in education, employment or training) risk becoming “disconnected” 18-29-year-olds who are at alarmingly high risk for housing insecurity, substance abuse, interpersonal violence and prolonged mental health challenges, especially depression.

Young Black Americans already suffer the highest rates of disconnection compared to other races (almost 30% of rural Black young adults are disconnected, and one out of five in urban areas). With eye-popping tuition hikes (40 times their 1963 average), the effective death of affirmative action in college admissions and recent Trump administration restrictions on the federal financial aid on which Black students disproportionately rely, African American college hopefuls seem to be losing ground on all sides. Limited access to the unique sense of belonging provided by HBCUs, however, puts them on a potentially life-altering collision course. For thousands of freshmen every year, HBCUs do far more than pave paths to nifty degrees: the social and cultural connectivity of their campuses is the most effective antidote Black students have to the disconnection they routinely suffer elsewhere while coming of age in America.

HBCUs offer far more than conventional higher learning for students and communities. They were born during the abolition movement as Black resistance to the southern anti-literacy laws grew, and developed into engines for uplifting the formerly enslaved throughout reconstruction. The nation’s 99 accredited and operating HBCUs function as social contracts with Black communities and notions of Blackness itself. They generate racial knowledge, sustain historical and cultural traditions, provide key leadership for Black communities, and often have the largest economic and physical facilities’ footprint in their communities.

Their graduates routinely specialize in professions, advocacy and research that seek to improve conditions for the race overall. Though they account for only 3% of higher learning institutions and 10% of Black undergraduates nationally (as of 2021), HBCUs confer 35% of Black US bachelor’s degrees. While 90% of HBCU students receive some form of financial aid, Black colleges continue to punch above their weight class in alumni success and produce 75% of all Black PhDs, 40% of Black engineers and the same percentage of Black members of Congress, 50% of Black attorneys and physicians, and a whopping 80% of Black judges.

The upward mobility rate of their graduates (ie the percentage of students who are accepted from the bottom two household income quintiles who end up in the top three) is more than double the national average. HBCU alumni are more likely than their Black counterparts at other institutions to say that they received a high-quality education, with 88% reporting that their education helped support themselves and their families. Such strong outcomes are built upon strong mental health rates as well: 45% of HBCU students say their mental health is “flourishing” compared to 36% of college students sampled nationally in the same survey and 38% of Black students at predominantly white institutions (PWIs). While anxiety and substance abuse continue to plague disconnected Neets, students at HBCUs are at lower risk for these conditions than college students of all races and their Black peers elsewhere.

The sense of institutional belonging that 83% of HBCU attendees feel may be the secret sauce to that thriving mental health. While critics often indict these schools as lacking the interracial diversity of “the real world”, the belonging HBCUs foster can be attributed to their extensive intraracial diversity. “Racial discrimination typically leads to worsened mental health outcomes like depression and anxiety for Black college students,” said Riana Elyse Anderson, a psychologist at Columbia University. “Yet seeking out and having an affirming racial identity helps to thwart those negative outcomes. What’s more, HBCUs offer a unique space for that flourishing beyond what a Black student may find in an affinity group or on their own at a PWI.”

The community and collective affirmation found at Black colleges foster protective mental health components that Anderson notes are “critical for [student] wellbeing, particularly in this contentious political and social environment, and even without the robust financial or material resources at other institutions.” Mental health research on Black colleges confirms with data what the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote more than a century ago about the “mask that grins and lies”, a figurative nod to the self-conscious image that Black people in white spaces must carefully maintain. Black colleges offer one of the few respites for budding Black adults to safely unmask their authentic selves at just the point in their lives where they are coming to understand what that means and the lifelong emotional reassurance they can draw from it.

After the tragic death of Nolan Wells, an 18-year-old Black student who was found dead on a Mississippi island after an outing with an all-white group of friends, many Black teens and their parents alike are doubting how safe they can be when outnumbered by white peers. Neither mental health nor the racial exploration that helps fuel it can happen where Black youth and young adults feel unsafe, and Black colleges provide more than safety in numbers. From curricula that centers Black intellectualism, to faculty and mentors who are culturally attuned to common life challenges facing their students, to beloved “lunch ladies” and custodians who know them by name, HBCUs are many young Black adults’ best chance for an experience where they are neither under assault nor suspicion, nor do they need to watch their backs.

Hundreds of should-have-been Howard coeds are losing out on far more than freshman orientations, dorm room decorating and navigating a first day of classes. They are at a dual heightened risk for an already racially skewed American epidemic of young adult disconnection and the depression African Americans already disproportionately experience due to that disconnection. Black colleges are some of the only spaces where Black students will be covered by communities that are invested in their wellbeing, and that see their mental health and happiness as foundational to the American future. For thousands of inbound HBCU students, as well as those who are now hanging in limbo in the aftermath of Howard’s decision, the dream of attending a Black college is as much a consideration of what their minds can do best as it is what they can best do for their minds.