Benedict College now enrolls more men than women, and Coppin State’s newest class includes 42 percent more men than last year’s. The gains run against a decades-long decline, and both presidents say graduation, not admission, is where the work now sits.
For most of the past half century, the story of Black men at historically Black colleges has been one of steady retreat. Black men made up 38 percent of HBCU students in 1976, 31 percent in 2005 and 26 percent by 2022, according to an American Institute for Boys and Men analysis of federal enrollment data. Between 2010 and 2022, total HBCU enrollment fell 11 percent while Black male enrollment at those schools fell 25 percent, a steeper drop than the 22 percent decline for Black men across all colleges. Two campuses, one in South Carolina and one in Maryland, are now reporting numbers moving the other way, as The EDU Ledger reported this week.
At Benedict College in Columbia, South Carolina, men now outnumber women in the undergraduate population, a rarity among coeducational HBCUs. President Dr. Roslyn Clark Artis told The EDU Ledger she believes the only other HBCU with more men is Morehouse College, which is a men’s college by design. That makes Benedict’s position more unusual than the comparison suggests. At Coppin State University in Baltimore, new male undergraduate enrollment rose from 284 in fall 2025 to 403 in fall 2026, an increase of 42 percent, as part of the largest incoming class in the university’s history. The university says male enrollment is up 74 percent since 2021.
Two Campuses, Two Explanations
The schools describe their gains differently. At Coppin, President Dr. Anthony L. Jenkins credits a deliberate shift in approach. He told The EDU Ledger that male enrollment had been falling there, as it had nationally, until the university stopped telling young Black men what they wanted and started listening to what they said. Many asked why they needed a degree when they could go straight into a job or a trade. Coppin’s answer was to reframe college as a path to ownership rather than an alternative to work: “You can be the CEO. It could be your company,” Jenkins said. The university pairs that message with mentoring from upperclassmen, faculty and alumni. More than 60 percent of its incoming men are first-generation college students, and Jenkins put Coppin’s retention rate at 77 percent.
At Benedict, the cause is less clear, even to the people running the school. Artis said the share of men crept up year after year for about seven years before crossing 50 percent roughly two years ago. She told The EDU Ledger the college began paying close attention once the trend became visible but isn’t sure it engineered the change. Faculty describe a word-of-mouth effect, with students calling cousins and friends back home to recruit them. Dr. Walter McDaniels, Benedict’s new chair of criminal justice administration and social sciences, estimated that one student can bring in as many as five others.
From Getting In to Getting Out
What the two presidents agree on is what comes next. Benedict has launched B.E.S.T. Men, a mandatory four-year mentoring program for male freshmen built around belonging, educational excellence, service and thoughtfulness. It’s supported by a $100,000 grant from The Boulé Foundation. Students attend speaker sessions and can join biweekly small-group conversations with trained facilitators. Those who attend six of eight sessions become eligible for a pool from which 40 students will be chosen to study abroad in December.
The urgency comes from the graduation gap. Artis told The EDU Ledger that research shows Black women’s graduation rates can run 20 to 30 percentage points higher than Black men’s. She warned that without systems to close that gap, the rising number of men on campus could translate into falling graduation rates. Enrollment gains that don’t lead to degrees can leave students with debt and no credential, which is a worse outcome than never enrolling.
Growth Is Not the Same as Parity
The numbers also call for some perspective. Coppin’s 403 new men arrived as part of an incoming class of more than 1,500 students, which means men still made up only about a quarter of new undergraduates. That’s close to the national HBCU share that has worried educators for years. The growth is real and fast, but at most campuses it’s a recovery from a low base, not a rebalancing. Benedict remains the exception rather than the new rule.
Both presidents are careful to frame the effort as additive, not a trade-off. Artis told The EDU Ledger that closing the gap for men isn’t meant to come at women’s expense, and Jenkins said more men are now competing for campus leadership roles that women had mostly held when he arrived. For HBCUs, the stakes go beyond any single campus. Research cited by the American Institute for Boys and Men finds HBCU students experience upward mobility at about twice the rate of college students overall. If these institutions can bring Black men back in larger numbers and carry them through to graduation, they could reverse one of the most persistent trends in American higher education. Benedict and Coppin show the first half is possible. The next four years will show whether the second half is.
Sources: Jatika Hudson, “At HBCUs, More Black Men Are Choosing College and Finding New Support,” The EDU Ledger, Sept. 28, 2026; Coppin State University; Inside Higher Ed; American Institute for Boys and Men.