Jaden Vann spent most of high school with one plan: Play football, get a scholarship, go to a historically Black college. He started at center and defensive tackle, the kind of player who takes a beating in the trenches every Friday night. By his senior year, his ankles and knees had been through so much that the game he loved no longer loved him back.
“I kind of lost passion for playing football,” said 20-year-old Vann. “So I went with Plan B.”
Plan B had actually been building since eighth grade, when Vann signed up for the welding pathway at Rockdale Career Academy almost on a whim. In 2025, he graduated from high school already trained, and nine months later he was working as a professional pipe welder, earning $31 an hour, well above the $20 to $25 he says most welders start at. He credits three years in the pathway with turning him from “OK” to “really great” by the time he reached trade school.
He now encourages his own former teammates to consider the same path.
“You don’t have to be a welder,” he tells them. “You can be an electrician, a plumber, you can do HVAC … you get to the bag a lot faster.”
Vann’s decision reflects a growing tension among Black men weighing their options post-high school. Do they pursue higher education at an HBCU or a predominantly white institution, or do they seek out job training in trade schools?
A complicated story
In 2018, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution took an in-depth look into the state of the nation’s HBCUs. Several prominent college finance experts worried many HBCUs could disappear in the next two decades, squeezed by falling enrollment, tighter budgets and competition from predominantly white institutions offering bigger scholarships. More than seven years later, the data tells a more complicated story.
HBCU enrollment has increased about 1% since 2018 to more than 300,000 students nationwide, reversing the prior downward trend. By comparison, enrollment in all higher education institutions is still on the decline.
Women outpace men overall in higher education, but the divide becomes even starker for Black men. According to data from the National Center for Education Statistics, Black male enrollment in all higher education institutions declined by 4% between 2018 and 2024. Black male enrollment at HBCUs declined at a slightly slower rate — about 3%. Men make up less 37% of HBCU students nationwide, according to an AJC analysis of federal data.
Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC
Credit: Arvin Temkar/AJC
Enrollment among Black men in trade schools is also on the rise, driven by the offer of lower debt and a faster path to an income. Black men’s enrollment in applied career studies programs like trade schools has increased 15% since 2018, according to an AJC analysis of data from the National Center for Education Statistics.
The data point to a shift in how Black men approach life after high school. Rather than following a single path to success, they’re weighing cost, career opportunities and long-term financial stability in new ways.
For some, that has meant renewed interest in HBCUs.
“HBCU used to be the thing,” said Georgette Brown Kimball, a retired longtime North Carolina educator who now runs a scholarship fund for HBCU students and the Roanoke Valley HBCU Collaborative Association. “But for 10 to 15 years, I didn’t hear that as much, because kids were not being routed to attend our HBCUs.”
Kimball said that has begun to change in just the last two or three years, as HBCUs like North Carolina A&T and Howard University have gotten more national visibility. Vice President Kamala Harris’ Howard degree, she said, did more to put HBCUs back on the map than most marketing campaigns ever did.
Credit: NYT
Credit: NYT
Gabrielle Edmonds, president of the Georgia School Counselor Association and a middle school counselor in Savannah, has seen the same renewed interest on the ground level.
“I feel as though our students are looking more into HBCUs, whether they are white students or Black students,” Edmonds said.
She points to the loosening of standardized-test and GPA requirements during the pandemic as one factor that opened the door for students who might not have considered applying before.
“I think they’re just trying to find a sense of community,” she said.
Kimball and Edmonds say HBCUs, PWIs and trade schools are not so much competitors as options to be weighed considering money, visibility and a sense of belonging.
Both women say the consideration should start before senior year.
Kimball now brings HBCU programming into middle schools, arguing that “senior year is too late.”
The same students who are aggressively recruited into trade or military paths are also the ones HBCUs need to reach the most. “You can easily go to the military,” Edmonds said, emphasizing that HBCUS must be as proactive in recruiting students.
Keeping Black men engaged
Debt-aversion and pressure to become a provider is showing up inside HBCUs in a stubborn gender gap that Clark Atlanta University is confronting head-on.
Patrick Turner, who leads Clark Atlanta’s Brotherhood Circle initiative, said the university’s student body runs roughly 75% female.
“It also makes you question: why are our males not choosing higher education? Where are they going? What are they doing?” Turner said.
The Brotherhood Circle pairs male students with mentors, alumni entrepreneurs and mental health resources, and sends a retreat cohort into the North Georgia mountains before finals. Turner said the program has produced a measurable GPA gap between students who participate consistently and those who don’t. He’s deliberate about language, too: the program frames mental health support as visits to a “consultant” rather than a “counselor,” he said, to sidestep the stigma that keeps many young Black men from seeking help at all.
“Being intelligent is not a weakness,” Turner said, describing conversations in which male students initially define masculinity purely in terms of money and material success, without mentioning intellect at all. “It ties to a lot of trauma … the way men are socialized.”
Angelina Bridges, a Clark Atlanta senior from Newnan, Georgia, feels the imbalance less in the classroom and more in student life. She points to Men of CAU and its counterpart, Women of CAU — she’s a member of the latter — and said the men’s group has put on far more events this past school year. The same pattern, she said, holds for Divine Nine fraternities versus sororities, with fraternity strolls and community service events drawing a more visible campus presence.
Bridges, a first-generation college student, sees the gap as partly generational: many of her friends’ mothers attended Spelman or Clark Atlanta themselves, creating a pipeline that doesn’t yet exist for a lot of young Black men. Her own brother chose Kennesaw State University over an HBCU, she said, not out of any negative feeling toward Clark Atlanta, but because “he just wasn’t hooked” on what she called HBCU culture.
Credit: Estela Muñoz/AJC
Credit: Estela Muñoz/AJC
Still, Bridges argues the case for HBCUs is bigger than enrollment optics.
“You’re surrounded by people who look like you, think like you,” she said, describing a brotherhood and emotional openness she believes more young Black men are missing out on. “They embrace each other,” she said. “They embrace feeling their feelings … and building strong connections that last a lifetime.”
Evolving HBCU programs
That question of whether students stay, graduate and thrive once they enroll is one Roderick Heath, vice chancellor and dean of students at Fayetteville State University in North Carolina, has spent his career trying to answer.
“We need Black doctors, we need lawyers, we need Black men in all aspects of the world,” Heath said. “Not having Black men on college campuses is a disservice to humanity.”
But Heath is also quick to acknowledge why so many young Black men are making the same calculation Jaden Vann made to choose a trade school.
“Historically, Black males have not been doing well in the K-to-12 model, not that they can’t do the work,” Heath said. “The structure, the need for them to make money, they just feel like school is not going to get them there because they don’t know what the future holds.”
His prescription isn’t to dismiss the trades; it’s to blur the line between them and college. He invokes Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois, the two towering, opposing architects of Black education philosophy, as a blueprint for how HBCUs might do both.
“If I were a chancellor of a university, we would offer things like that. You go to class at night, we have barber school for you. You want to be a plumber? Partner up, and those could be electives they can take at night,” Heath said. “I think we need a little combination of the two.”
He points to Arizona State University’s first-ever content creator degree as evidence that HBCUs don’t have to reinvent the wheel; they have to read where the culture is going and meet young men there.
But more than curriculum, Heath argues the deeper fix is infrastructure, not dining halls or bigger enrollment numbers, but recording studios, AI labs and the kind of technology that prepares students for the workforce they’re actually entering.
“We spend so much time trying to grow, grow, grow,” he said. “But growth doesn’t always mean better. Growth only opens up gaps for other things. Somebody’s going to get left behind.”
Heath pointed to Howard University’s recent decision to unenroll hundreds of students after an enrollment surge as a cautionary tale of what happens when an HBCU chases numbers it can’t yet support.
“If I’m a Black male and I said, ‘Boy, I got into Howard,’ then all of a sudden I get a letter telling me I’m not going, that young man might say, ‘You know what? I ain’t even going to college. Let me go get a trade,’” Heath said. “We set students up for disappointment.”
His core message is less about enrollment and more about trust. “We can’t get them here and just forget them here,” Heath said. “We can’t just make it look good on orientation day and friends and family weekend. It has to look like this every day.”
Credit: Estela Muñoz/AJC
Credit: Estela Muñoz/AJC
For Vann, the choice already made sense long before anyone framed it as a national trend. Nine months out of a three-year high school pathway, he was earning more than most college graduates twice his age, with a mentor bench of co-workers two and three times his age helping him navigate the rest.
“This is a great opportunity,” Vann said. “You can really make a great living at it.”
About this project
This story was done in partnership with the Ida B. Wells Society Investigative Reporting Fellowship, a program designed to sharpen the skills of a select group of journalists. The reporters involved in the project are current and recent graduates of HBCUs. The reporting team interviewed several dozen students, HBCU officials, educators and others. The team reviewed federal reports, independent studies and other documents for the reporting.
About the authors
Antonio Mattox Jr. is a senior at North Carolina A&T State University.
Credit: Courtesy of Antonio Mattox
Credit: Courtesy of Antonio Mattox
Kevin Pernell is a rising senior at North Carolina A&T State University.
Credit: Courtesy of Kevin Pernell
Credit: Courtesy of Kevin Pernell
Shimei Cook is a 2026 graduate of Fayetteville State University in North Carolina.
Credit: Courtesy of Shimei Cook
Credit: Courtesy of Shimei Cook
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