A task force is working to expand higher education offerings in Oakland by bringing a historically Black college or university to the city, with Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee a central part of he effort.
There are a little over 100 recognized HBCUs in the country. They are concentrated in the Southeast because many were established in the years following the Civil War, when African Americans were barred from most colleges and universities.
The West Coast has one historically Black educational institution — the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science in Los Angeles, one of only a handful of historically Black medical schools in the nation. If an HBCU lands in Oakland, it could offer the first opportunity for undergraduate students in California to get a culturally relevant education closer to home.
Stemming the ‘brain drain’
When students head east to enroll at an HBCU, they often don’t come back, said Kim Thompson, a member of the Oakland HBCU task force. She described that as a loss for California’s workforce.
“That’s a big brain drain and loss of students who could be staying here and gaining access to high-wage STEM careers that the Bay Area has to offer,” Thompson said. “There’s a lot of students we think could benefit from the culturally affirming education that an HBCU could provide.”
The Oakland HBCU initiative, a fiscally sponsored project of the Oakland Fund, officially launched last year and is still in the early stages. Leading the effort is a volunteer task force composed of Lee and people from business, higher education, civic and philanthropic communities in Oakland.
The group undertook a feasibility study this year to explore the potential economic impacts of a campus for Oakland and to identify which industries here are primed for growth. Thompson said the volunteers plan to publish the results of the study in the next month, but said they’ve already identified technology, entrepreneurship, life sciences, artificial intelligence, logistics and transportation as areas of focus.
The task force will then move to the next phase: solidifying a list of interested schools and settling on a location. The team is exploring a range of ideas, including a satellite campus for a single college, a hub center that would allow multiple colleges and universities to offer classes in Oakland and a partnership with the Peralta Community College District to offer a pathway to a four-year degree from an HBCU.
California’s community colleges already have a transfer pathway for students to enroll at HBCUs, which guarantees admission to more than 30 colleges and comes with a $5,000 scholarship, but few students take it, Taína Knox, another member of the task force, said.
“Students are still hesitant to transfer to out-of-state schools and having an HBCU school here in California would have an impact,” Knox told the Oaklandside. “We think that an HBCU partnership could bolster what is already happening and hopefully increase students’ resiliency to continue through with the process that they start.”
In 2022, Paul Quinn College, an HBCU in Dallas, was in talks to establish a campus in Oakland. In 2024, Thompson and others, including then-Deputy Mayor Kimberly Mayfield representing the mayor’s office, attended the annual conference of the United Negro College Fund, the HBCU membership organization, to scout interest in Oakland.
After Lee became mayor last year, the talks restarted. At one point, Howard University, the country’s top-ranked private HBCU, was interested, Thompson said.
“They came out for a site visit, we had ongoing conversations with them for several months,” Thompson said. “Currently, they have an interim leader in place, so now is not perfect timing for them to be making a definitive decision on something like this, but we continue to keep them in mind.”
Lee said she is able to tap connections with HBCUs that she built during her time in Congress. Lee, who graduated from Mills College, the former women’s college in Oakland, has family members who attended HBCUs and received an honorary doctorate from Howard University last year.
Stabilizing Oakland’s Black population
Establishing an HBCU in Oakland could be crucial to stabilizing the city’s Black population, Lee said. When she was elected to Congress, 40% of Oakland was Black, she said, and now it’s around 20%.
“Here in Oakland, gentrification, redlining and systemic discrimination has been a driver of bringing our population down,” she said. “This would give some stability in many ways to the Black population and for everyone in Oakland to see that we still care about the Black community and Black students.”
In exploring potential locations, the task force has toured the former Holy Names University campus in the hills, as well as locations in downtown Oakland, but they don’t want to commit to a site until they’re further along in talks with the colleges.
The group also held listening sessions last fall with students to gauge their interest in an HBCU here.
“A lot of students said, ‘It’d be great to go to an HBCU, but I’m the first in my family to go to college and it’s expensive to travel out of state,’” Thompson said. “But if it were here, that would be a great alternative opportunity to go to an HBCU, which many students had an interest in attending.”
McBride writes for Oaklandside. This story was originally published by the Oaklandside and distributed through a partnership with the Associated Press.
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