From advents in automation to the realities of a distributed workforce, a new era of work has dawned—and with it, a new style of teamwork. This is part of a series exploring Deloitte’s Modern Teams methodology and the nonlinear, diverse, multifunctional teams that put humanity at the center to drive meaningful business outcomes.
America’s first university was founded in 1636.
No Black person would receive a degree in the United States for nearly another 200 years.
From day one, traditional higher education in the U.S. was simply not designed for everyone. The first colleges and universities were built to provide refinement opportunities for students after their primary and secondary education—opportunities that would empower students to enter America’s upper echelons. But, for the first 200 years, these opportunities were only open to white men.
Despite that inherent inequity, most higher education institutions in the country stem from these traditional roots—with the exception of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). Since their inception in 1837, HBCUs have been fundamentally different in their intention to uplift, connect, and educate an excluded and marginalized community.
But due to both that unique foundational nature and persistent societal racism, HBCUs and their community-based approach to education have long been considered “less than.” “Higher Education has historically viewed these institutions as inferior because they were founded to serve a different population,” says Ed Smith-Lewis, vice president for strategic partnerships and institutional programs at UNCF. “But actually, they’re special because they’re different.”
And today, in a time where low enrollment and financial and equity challenges are rapidly eroding traditional higher education’s sustainability, the things that make HBCUs different may also be what make them the only organizations in the industry poised to save it.
The vanguard of change
“There is an undeniable connection between why institutions are formed and the group of people they’re designed to serve,” says Julian Thompson, director of strategy at UNCF. “When you decide to design for the communities that have been excluded, your institution, by its very nature, will manifest differently.”
For 78 years, the UNCF has worked with HBCUs to drive institutional improvements in areas from executive leadership and strategic finance to data management—and increasingly, tech and online learning. In recent years, they’ve started to uncover one common need across all the institutions they work with: a digital education platform designed both specifically for their communities and for the concept of community as a whole.
Julian Thompson
Director of Strategy, UNCF
Listen to a conversation segment between Dan Helfrich, Chair and CEO of Deloitte Consulting LLP, and UNCF’s Julian Thompson.
Dan: There’s a pandemic and UNCF has a responsibility and opportunity to help HBCUs with creating virtual education opportunities when people are separate now more than ever. I’d love to hear how you identified your challenge and how you approached it – specifically how you approached it differently given the uniqueness of the circumstance.
Julian: When the pandemic hit, we realized that we’d have to engage with HBCUs in a new way to be able to respond to the education challenge of online. HBCUs have a high-touch, high-engagement model. They help first-generation, low-income students succeed because of the method of community building infused in their approach to higher education. So, as we moved into the pandemic, our first step was to think carefully about enabling HBCUs to use the existing tools and resources available in higher education, to be able to engage with their students online. But as we thought more long term, the fundamental question we asked ourselves is ‘there’s a special sauce about how HBCUs operate and how they always operated. What could we do to take those elements, those assets, those methods of being, and translate them, reimagine them for the online context? It was exciting to be able to crystalize that, we actually crystallized some of those ideas before the pandemic, because we knew this was the direction that higher ed was going. Once the pandemic hit and once the country started to experience that racial reckoning in 2020, that caused awareness that the country needed to move forward, to think differently, to take new risks to be able to innovate. We started to be able to build the momentum for what we now call HBCUv – which is our aspiration to reimagine higher education online in the spirit of how HBCUs operate.
As unique, high-touch, community-based environments, HBCUs require unique, high-touch digital experiences that most learning management systems simply don’t provide—something that was underscored during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, when higher ed institutions around the country had to go entirely remote. So UNCF set out to build a new kind of platform—one that would bring the HBCU experiences to the virtual landscape while maintaining the integrity of the peer-to-peer learning models at the heart of these institutions.
A learning management system and social experience in one, this platform—called HBCUv—will not only provide high-quality remote learning tools but will also center community engagement as a fundamental part of the digital experience. “We are reimagining the HBCU experience in a virtual environment,” says Julian.
But translating this power of place into the digital sphere is a massive undertaking with an inherent challenge. As Julian puts it, “How do you take what makes HBCUs special—culture, community, empowerment, belief in oneself—and bring that all to bear in an online platform?”
UNCF knew early on they would need a collaborative, modern team to tackle this project. Working with Deloitte Digital's Ethos, UNCF built a coalition across HBCUs that would help bring its vision to life. Together, the teams conducted an exhaustive discovery phase to gather input from nine initial institutions. This process allowed them to intentionally build and refine the vision for HBCUv, ultimately resulting in six core design principles.
"The first one is promoting Black excellence,” says Dr. Valora Richardson, PhD, director of digital solutions and innovations at UNCF. “We’re hoping that this platform will be an area where we can display that not just with our faculty and our administrators, but also with our students and our community.”
The other tenets include Creating Black Futures, Connecting Black Talent, Putting Flexibility First, Driving Results with Data, and Activating Collective Genius—the last of which is Valora’s favorite. “We’re going to have a place where we can invite speakers in to talk to the community and elevate some of the voices at each one of our institutions,” she says.
While UNCF hopes to launch a beta version next year, the priority is inclusivity and efficacy over speed. “We want to do it right,” says Ed. “If we’re not getting it right, we have to slow down. Being inclusive means losing some of your impatience.”
UNCF has extremely robust aspirations—and rightfully so. At the forefront of their mission is closing the equity gap for Black individuals and communities. Not only will HBCUv help more Black students receive a transformational education, but it will help connect them to professional opportunities post-graduation.
UNCF hopes that HBCUv will become an obvious starting place for job recruiters. “We always hear that there’s a dearth of Black talent, or organizations can’t find the Black talent that they want,” says Ed. “But the reality is, they’re just not looking in the right places.”
Within higher education, HBCUv will help level the playing field between HBCUs and traditional institutions. The hope is to offer HBCUv at zero cost to institutions, making top-tier tech accessible to universities that have traditionally been priced out of the current options. This will help empower HBCUs to share resources via the platform while offering virtually unparalleled digital learning experiences to all their students. In addition, it will help address inequities in funding for institutions that rely predominantly on enrollment revenue and can’t depend on large endowments or patent libraries to generate passive income.
Ed Smith-Lewis
Vice President for Strategic Partnerships and Institutional Programs, UNCF
Listen to a conversation between Dan Helfrich, Chair and CEO of Deloitte Consulting LLP, and UNCF’s Ed Smith-Lewis.
Dan: It’s clear that non HBCU, higher educational institutions have a lot to learn and I’m curious how you think about your team and the work you’re doing. How do you think about exporting that goodness to the broader world vs. preserving it within the HBCU community?
Ed: America’s an interesting place because it’s more about who you know and what they know about you, than what you actually do. And I argue all the time with my team, we push our institutions to document and share as much as you can, as often as you can. Within our cohort of institutions, our community of practice, we talk about stealing what works. But the reality is if it works over there for their students and you have the same student-type then why reinvent the wheel, because if you think about our success as community success, rather than institutional success, you’ll realize that you can go fast alone but you can go further together and that’s how we approach this work.
And underpinning it all is a fundamental ownership. "We’re trying to build HBCUv as something for HBCUs, by HBCUs—but also owned by HBCUs,” Ed says.
Letting HBCUs lead
It’s no surprise that the last few years have been challenging for the higher education industry. Enrollment is steadily declining. Operating costs are skyrocketing. And the value of a college degree is becoming less and less certain. “We’re experiencing a dynamic where Americans are losing trust in their institutions,” says Julian. “From the government to churches to education, people are questioning which institutions are going to show us the way forward.”
To survive, colleges and universities require innovative solutions to these problems. They need new business models, effective ways to interact and share resources, and better methods to attract and support more diverse students. And, just maybe, they need to rethink a foundational purpose that dates back to the 1600s.
They should consider thinking like HBCUs when approaching certain challenges.
These very challenges that are new to so many are the ones the HBCUs have faced for nearly 200 years. Since day one, they’ve been helping diverse students thrive, providing outstanding education despite being under-resourced, and adapting to ever-changing community needs. And it's this proven track record of overcoming challenges that uniquely positions HBCUs to lead the next phase of higher education.
Julius Tapper
Senior Manager, Deloitte Consulting LLP
Listen to commentary from Deloitte team member Julius Tapper.
The team that we put together for the HBCUv project represents in the same way that HBCUs represent a certain magic and certain secret sauce that has lessons for the entire education industry. When we look at the makeup of the team the diversity goes way beyond that, we have eagle scouts on the team, we have folks who are professional chefs in former lives, we have varsity athletes, we have singers, we have dancers, we have folks from many countries of origin. And if community and culture are some of the deepest human truths, and if everything that we do as humans on the earth is somewhat relational, then creating the space for some of those relationships, cultivating environment of community, recognizing that everything is through culture. That’s how you start to create the conditions of magic, that’s how you start to allow some of the kinetic energy of all of our bustling lives coming together.
The development of HBCUv could represent a sea change for higher education. As leaders across the industry reckon with the reality that, as it exists today, the system is not sustainable, the solution may lay in a centuries-old question: Will education leaders choose to continue down their current path? Or look to the examples Black colleges and universities are setting for answers?
Greatness is being produced every day on these campuses,” says Ed. “HBCUs may be untapped, but they’re not unknown.”
Or as Julian puts it: America can learn a lot from HBCUs. It just has to finally pay attention.
This story was produced by WIRED Brand Lab for Deloitte.
