The Great Chinese HBCU Takeover Only Exists In Trump’s Brain
Let’s unpack Donald Trump’s latest hallucination, shall we?
The president recently claimed that HBCUs are being kept alive by the massive enrollment of Chinese international students and would all be out of business without them. Yes, he said that, and he meant it. He said it with the confidence of a man who once thought Frederick Douglass was still alive and doing great work “right now.”
Let me begin with what I actually know, from a decade of teaching and walking the halls and yards in the HBCU world. I’ve seen more ancestors and ghosts than I have Chinese students.
I jest about the ancestors and ghosts floating across the yard.
But in 10 years, I have taught thousands of students. They include Black students from the South, the Northeast, the Caribbean, Africa, the Midwest, the West Coast, and the DMV. I have taught Black-Asian students. I have taught diaspora kids, first-gen kids, brilliant kids, struggling kids, kids who entered my class knowing exactly who they were, and kids who discovered themselves in the process.
In all that time, I have encountered Chinese and other Asian faculty and administrators, yes. But the Great Wall of Enrollment that Trump is fantasizing about, absolutely not. No mysterious wave of Chinese students filling up my rosters. No hidden demographic takeover.
But Trump looked straight into a camera and declared that without Chinese students, HBCUs would collapse. Meanwhile, the rest of us are squinting and scratching our heads, wondering if he accidentally confused “HBCU” with one of those struggling PWIs that actually depend on full-pay international students to keep from closing their dorms. Because Trump’s understanding of higher ed is basically a Mad Lib: insert race, insert country, insert panic, insert lie.
Let’s bring in the updated numbers, because MAGA likes to twist data like it’s balloon art. As of 2022, about 76% of HBCU students are Black. Non-Black students account for about 24%, and that is every race, every ethnicity, every identity outside “Black,” all lumped together.
International students across HBCUs peaked at around 9,361 back in 2015-16. That includes students from the Caribbean, Africa, South America, Europe, Asia—everywhere. And even if you combined every Asian American student and every Asian international student across all 100+ HBCUs, the figure would still be tiny relative to the overall student population. One of the last specific counts we have shows 4,311 Asian American students at HBCUs in 2011 across the entire nation, and the updated data still suggests nothing remotely close to a Chinese enrollment boom.
In other words, this “Chinese takeover” of HBCUs is happening only in Trump’s head.
But Trump’s lie isn’t accidental. It fits perfectly into his long pattern of disrespecting HBCUs. Remember, during his presidency, he repeatedly lied that he funded HBCUs for the first time ever, even as his budgets tried to slash the very programs created decades before he took office. He used HBCU presidents as photo-op props, bragged about imaginary accomplishments, and then turned around and gutted civil rights enforcement, attacked diversity initiatives, and chipped away at the federal supports that help minority-serving institutions survive. It was all performance and no substance.
And right now, HBCUs are quietly holding their breath.
They know exactly what Trump is signaling. They know he is trying to rewrite the story of Black education by framing it as something fragile, unstable, and dependent on outside aid because if he can define it as weak, he can justify defunding it. He can tell his base that these schools aren’t worth investment. He can tell states that they’re not “viable.” He can attack them the same way conservatives have attacked DEI, Black Studies, and anything that affirms Black life in public institutions.
Trump’s comment also exposes something deeper. He believes in segregated higher education. Not necessarily in the old Jim Crow sense, with signs on water fountains and such, but in the new version where Black students are pushed back into underfunded spaces while PWIs quietly resegregate themselves through admissions, culture wars, and policy shifts. He wants to keep Black students out of predominantly white institutions. He wants to shrink our access to PWIs. He wants a world where HBCUs stay small, under-resourced, and beholden to the benevolence of others.
That’s why he made this comment now. He’s trying to reduce Black institutions to charity cases. He’s trying to tell white America, “See? These schools can’t stand on their own.” And by dragging China into it, he’s stoking Black-Asian tension, which is another favorite trick in his political playbook. Make groups fight each other so they don’t notice the real source of the problem: him and his conservative ilk.
Here’s what’s real.
HBCUs have survived everything: slavery, Reconstruction-era sabotage, Jim Crow, segregation, land-grant theft, decades of federal neglect, and the underfunding that continues to this very day. They survived presidents who ignored them, governors who defunded them, and legislators who mocked them. They survived eras when PWIs refused to admit us and eras when PWIs pretended to welcome us but still treated us as outsiders. And they’re still here. Strong. Growing. Producing the highest number of Black doctors, Black lawyers, Black judges, Black engineers, Black politicians, Black teachers, Black researchers, Black attorneys, and Black journalists in the nation.
They are not fragile. They are foundational.
HBCUs do not need China. And they definitely do not need a racist fever dream masquerading as a demographic analysis. Yes, HBCUs receive federal and state appropriations, sometimes generous, often insufficient, but if Trump wants to talk about the lifeblood of these institutions, he needs to start with the Black communities who built them brick by brick. The students, alumni, faculty, parents, and supporters who have sustained them for generations. The funding matters, but the foundation has always been Black.
If Donald Trump wants to discuss dependency, he should go talk to the PWIs that panic every time international enrollment dips. If he wants to talk about collapse, he can visit the universities that have been swallowed by budget cuts and mismanagement. HBCUs have been surviving in the United States of America since 1837 when Cheyney University was established. We are not trembling over a hypothetical drop in Chinese enrollment.
Black colleges are fortified by more than a century and a half of labor, love, brilliance… and fight.
Dr. Stacey Patton is an award-winning journalist and author of “Spare The Kids: Why Whupping Children Won’t Save Black America” and the forthcoming “Strung Up: The Lynching of Black Children In Jim Crow America.” Read her Substack here.
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