States Have Shorted Black Land-Grant Universities by $12 Billion Since 1987

Every state with a Black land-grant university also has a second, older land-grant university — the one founded under the 1862 Morrill Act, usually the flagship.▸ Both were promised the same deal: federal research and extension money, matched by the state. But the law that sets the match rate treats them differently. States must match land-grant capacity funds dollar for dollar, full stop — unless the school is one of the 19 "1890 institutions," the Black land-grants created by the second Morrill Act. There, federal law lets the Secretary of Agriculture waive the match down to 50 cents on the dollar if a state says it can't pay full freight. Nothing requires a state to use that discretion generously. Many states simply paid less, year after year, because the law let them.

The match requirement is written into the National Agricultural Research, Extension, and Teaching Policy Act of 1977, codified at 7 U.S.C. § 3222d.▸ Subsection (c) is unambiguous: for research and extension capacity funds, "the State shall provide equal matching funds from non-Federal sources" — a full, dollar-for-dollar match. Subsection (d) then carves out the exception, letting the Secretary "waive the matching funds requirement... above the 50 percent level for any fiscal year" for the 1890 institutions (and, in insular areas, for their 1862 counterparts) if the state is judged unlikely to pay in full. In practice, that turns a mandatory match into a floor a state can undershoot by half — and only at the Black land-grants.

The dollar consequence of that gap surfaced in September 2023, when Education Secretary Miguel Cardona and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack sent letters to the governors of 16 states, laying out what each state would have paid its 1890 institution had it funded it at the same per-student rate as its 1862 land-grant, using NCES Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System enrollment and state-appropriation data from 1987 through 2020.▸ The combined shortfall across the 16 states came to more than $12 billion — some tallies of the same federal analysis, adding two more states, put the number closer to $13 billion, per NPR. State-by-state, the gaps ranged from $172 million up to $2.14 billion, according to the same USDA release.

Tennessee State University's number is the largest of the group: $2.1 billion, per the federal analysis — more than the state legislature's own 2021 internal review found (a narrower $544 million estimate covering only required matching payments, not the full per-student comparison).▸ In Oklahoma, state Sen. Monroe Nichols calculated a version of the same story in appropriation terms: over the prior decade, Langston University received about 45 cents in state match for every federal dollar, while Oklahoma State University received $3.14. Separately, a Century Foundation analysis found that between 2011 and 2022, unmatched federal funds cost the 19 Black land-grants roughly $200 million nationally — the direct, dollar cost of states using the 50-percent waiver instead of the full match their 1862 counterparts are required to pay.

Money that never arrives doesn't just vanish from a ledger — it shows up as staff never hired and offices never opened.▸ Tennessee is a clean case because both of its land-grant extension services publish their own coverage.

UT Extension — the 1862 land-grant service run out of the University of Tennessee — keeps an office in every one of Tennessee's 95 counties and employs more than 1,000 staff statewide.▸ TSU Extension, run out of Tennessee State University, the state's 1890 land-grant, has agents and outreach staff in 50 of those 95 counties, backed by about twenty extension specialists on the main campus. Both run under the same federal extension mandate, in the same state, funded by the same kind of formula dollar — but one reaches every county and the other reaches roughly half.

State-by-state shortfall figures are drawn from the same September 2023 federal letters but reported through different secondary outlets, since the original per-institution table was not independently republished by USDA; each figure is individually sourced above. County-coverage figures are current as published by each university's extension service and are not adjusted for population or land area.