COLUMBIA, S.C. — Christopher Davis arrived at Howard University in the fall of 2021 determined to become the first man in his family to earn a college degree. Four years, two unenrollments, and one hospitalization later, that goal looked further away than ever.

"The first time [I left], it was really just me not knowing a lot about myself — who I was, what I wanted to do," said Davis, now 24. "Being at Howard, there's a competitiveness — like, 'I have to achieve this, or it's nothing.'"

Davis isn't an outlier. He's part of a national pattern: Black men are leaving — or never arriving at — American colleges, and the drop-off is even steeper at the institutions historically built to serve them.

A national decline, and a steeper one at HBCUs

Black male undergraduate enrollment fell about 22% between 2010 and 2022 across all U.S. colleges and universities, according to the American Institute for Boys and Men. At HBCUs, it fell 25%.

Black men now make up roughly 26% of HBCU enrollment, down from 38% in 1976 — the peak year for Black male enrollment at these schools, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Female enrollment, meanwhile, has climbed every year since.

Administrators point to a familiar cluster of causes: money problems, family obligations, mental health struggles, and a simple sense of not belonging. But a handful of HBCUs are treating the crisis as a call to rebuild — not just recruiting more Black men, but re-engineering how their campuses support them once they arrive.

The outlier: Benedict College

One school is moving in the opposite direction. At Benedict College in Columbia, South Carolina, men now make up more than 54% of the student body — up from around 42% in past decades, and second only to all-male Morehouse among HBCUs.

"We understand kids are different," said Roslyn Artis, Benedict's first Black woman president. "We're trying to create a resource-rich environment so there are ways for students to find belonging — to find their people, their tribe."

Freshman Javarius Hunter, a South Carolina native, said Benedict simply offered the best financial aid package among the HBCUs he considered. When he got to campus, administrators told him he'd landed in one of the largest incoming classes of Black men the school had seen.

That's not an accident. Yohannis Job, Benedict's vice president for enrollment management, tracks retention and financial data closely enough to see exactly where Black male students fall through the cracks — usually money, family strain, or isolation.

"We have been very intentional about targeting our Black boys that are serious," Job said. "When we look at our student affairs staff, our athletic staff, our enrollment staff — it's been predominantly men. And something is echoing there."

Off-campus students who struggled to adjust got extra tracking, outreach, and better aid packages. Male faculty members hand out their personal phone numbers. Parents — many navigating the college process for the first time alongside their sons — get their own open-door policy, including virtual campus tours and early registration help.

"We realized most of our first-gen students really have no conceptualization of the enrollment process," Job said.

Before launching a new initiative for Black men this year, Benedict ran focus groups and found a stubborn cultural barrier: many students already knew about fraternities and support programs like Barbershop Talks — they just weren't using them.

"We needed to break down this barrier where young men's machismo prevented them from leveraging the resources that were at their disposal," said J.R. Greene, a retired South Carolina school superintendent who helped design the response.

That response, the B.E.S.T. (Belonging, Excellence, Service, Thoughtfulness) Men initiative, is now mandatory for incoming male freshmen. It's backed by a $100,000 grant from Sigma Pi Phi, the nation's oldest Black Greek-letter professional fraternity, and pairs students with mentorship and academic support. Artis regularly consults older Black men on campus for guidance — her husband has taught students how to change a tire and check their oil.

"The secret sauce is that we have men on this campus who are deeply committed to spending their off time" this way, Artis said. "We want to see equitable outcomes for men and women on this campus."

Mentorship as a lifeline, before college even starts

The pattern holds elsewhere: students who make it through often point to one thing — someone who stayed in their corner.

Reggie Locke, like Davis, set out to be his family's first college graduate. Unlike Davis, he had a built-in support network years before he ever enrolled, at Harris-Stowe State University in St. Louis.

Locke's high school, University Academy in Kansas City, made HBCU campus visits routine. "The first time I went on an HBCU campus … I was like, 'Whoa,'" he said, recalling meeting alumni from his own school there. "They were so adamant about us going to HBCUs — and we could see that it already was changing and developing them as people."

His teachers and principal stayed in touch through college breaks, sometimes quietly chipping in money when things got tight. At Harris-Stowe, seeing Black men in leadership pushed Locke to get involved himself — he became a resident assistant and joined student government.

What Howard is doing — and what Davis missed

Davis's experience shows what happens when that support doesn't reach a struggling student in time.

Shortly before enrolling, he'd been diagnosed with bipolar depressive disorder. On campus, marijuana use triggered mental health episodes severe enough to land him in the hospital before his first semester even ended. He told no one. After stepping away and returning in January 2023, he unenrolled again about a year later — worn down by financial holds on his account and Washington's brutal housing market. He finished his coursework online through Bellevue University instead.

Howard had, in fact, launched a support program around the same time Davis was struggling: the Men of the Mecca Initiative, aimed at improving outcomes for Black male students. Davis was never identified for it.

Calvin Hadley, senior adviser to Howard's president, said the program was still finding its footing during the pandemic, when many students needed more support than the university was positioned to give. Nearly six years later, it's still running — including an annual ritual where incoming freshmen write down their fears and burn them, part of a broader effort to build community and normalize seeking help. Hadley also works with Black boys in D.C.'s K-12 schools, regardless of whether they ever apply to Howard.

"Success doesn't always look like coming directly to Howard," he said. "It could look like you are seeing yourself in a different place."

A gap between advising and coaching

Henri LaSane, who runs HBCU programming for the nonprofit InsideTrack, says the missing piece for students like Davis often isn't academic advising — it's coaching, specifically from people who've walked the same path.

Between fall 2021 and spring 2026, InsideTrack provided retention coaching to more than 11,000 enrolled students and re-enrollment coaching to over 23,000 who had already stopped out — many of them, like Davis, sidelined by balances under $5,000. More than 20% of the students InsideTrack worked with cited finances as their main barrier to continuing.

Of the roughly 43,000 Black students the nonprofit coached at HBCUs and other predominantly Black institutions, a third were men — and only half of those received one-on-one coaching.

"If I am a coach and I am working with a Black male who is struggling and has maybe stopped out, and I'm able to explain that I also traversed a similar path … then it's the old saying: no one cares how much you know until they know how much you care," LaSane said.

Howard didn't offer that kind of one-on-one coaching when Davis needed it most.

Looking back

Davis is now working and set to finish a business degree through Bellevue in 2027. Looking back, his advice to students headed to college is blunt: get a mental health evaluation before you arrive, and learn what support actually exists on campus and in the surrounding city before you need it.

"Know the way each resource can work for you," he said, "so that you're able to progress."