Some schools have turned to crowdfunding. Bennett College, an all-women’s H.B.C.U. in North Carolina, was on the brink of closing in December after losing accreditation because of its financial instability. So the college began a #StandWithBennett campaign. It raised $8.2 million by February and regained accreditation, for now. But crowdfunding campaigns are a Band-Aid for wounds that needs surgery.

In 2017, after almost shuttering, Paul Quinn College in Texas turned the campus football field into a farm and the school into a work college, the first H.B.C.U. of that kind. Work colleges require residential students to do graded work — think helping to build a new dorm or answering phones in the admissions office — to offset the cost of tuition. It has worked so well for Paul Quinn that the school is looking to open a second site.

Tennessee State University and Morgan State University in Baltimore have placed their bets on boosting their international student enrollment by the hundreds. For the past decade, most of their students from abroad have come from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and pay full tuition plus room and board for the precious commodity of an American STEM or business degree. It has been so lucrative that Morgan State has even increased the number of engineering classes offered over the summer to meet the demand.

I don’t know whether ad hoc changes like these will be enough. There are hundreds of colleges that have low graduation rates and struggle financially, but the pain felt by H.B.C.U.s is concentrated within a specific minority community. And the H.B.C.U. cultural mission — enrolling and attempting to uplift students of color, including those of limited resources — is a noble but difficult business model.

Any school ultimately has three funding streams. Of those three, public sources (grants, and federal, state and local appropriations) for H.B.C.U.s have been slashed, private investment is low, and H.B.C.U.s’ ability to raise tuition and fees — without either violating their core mission or suppressing the number of students who will even apply — is limited.

In Maryland, home to four public H.B.C.U.s, many predominantly white institutions have better-funded versions of programs offered at these neighboring H.B.C.U.s. The four of them viewed these programs as so similar to theirs that they sued the state over its being a direct attack on their ability to enroll more students. In September, Gov. Larry Hogan granted a $200 million settlement. But to put that in context, the University of Maryland at College Park — just one of those public “P.W.I.s” — received a private $215 million gift in 2017.

For H.B.C.U.s, alumni enthusiasm is high, but out of the 46 H.B.C.U.s covered in a 2017 article by U.S. News & World Report, only 11 percent of alumni per school donated on average.