In his State of the Union Address, Barack Obama said that the Department of Education’s newly released College Scorecard would help parents and students “compare schools based on a simple criteria: where you can get the most bang for your educational buck”, but according to the latest statistics, America’s historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) consistently fail to meet that criteria

An analysis of the Scorecard puts HBCUs next to for-profit art schools when it comes to leaving students with high amounts of debt and degrees written in “red ink.” The free-market American Enterprise Institute’s Frederick Hess said that HBCUs are a “dangerous” topic of conversation in education circles. “The subject’s racially charged,” he said. “If we were to apply the gainful-employment method the federal government applies to for-profit schools to HBCUs, their students would no longer receive federal financial aid.” In 2012, the Department of Education described 218 post-secondary schools that could lose federal student aid if their students continue to exhibit three-year default rates over 30%. Fourteen were HBCUs. That means, of approximately 6,900 accredited schools nationwide, 3.2% could loose federal support, while 13.3% of HBCUs face that risk. Morehouse College in Atlanta — Martin Luther King, Jr.’s alma mater and one of the most famous HBCUs — is not in as much trouble as those 218 yet, but its numbers reflect the troubling trend. In 2011-2012, only 36% of Morehouse students had graduated in four years, and only 55% had graduated in six years, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics. And whether they graduated or not, 76% owed loans averaging over $40,000 to cover annual tuition of $23,234, a number the College Scorecard terms “high.” In addition, 27% of Morehouse students defaulted on loan payments. Jeanna Robinson of the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy called the Morehouse default rate “appalling.” The student loan default rate is 13.8% nationally, while at for-profit institutions — a diverse group ranging from University of Phoenix to cosmetology schools — the average rate is 22.7%. Nationally, the average student debt is $27,253. At all-male Morehouse, it’s nearly $10,000 higher. Only The Creative Center, the Manhattan School of Music and the Southern California Institute of Architecture — three for-profit art schools — show higher student debt. Most students at HBCUs fare significantly worse than Morehouse students. Just 41% of students at Clark Atlanta University graduate in six years, leaving campus with an average $24,653 of debt. Payscale.com estimates that Clark Atlanta students receive a 30-year return on their investment of negative $109,000. The online job compensation calculator estimates that students at Shaw University in North Carolina receive a return of negative $112,000. A negative “ROI” mean students at these two schools do worse financially over a 30-year period than if they had never attended. Hess says that the reason for such poor scores could be that many HBCU students often come from low-income backgrounds and are first-generation college attendees. But because “nobody looks,” he said, there is too little research on the topic to know for sure. “It’s politically incorrect to talk about,” the Center for College Affordability’s Anthony Vedder said. Vedder said that when he tried to raise the issue with black educators, “I almost got chased out of the room.”