Giving Compass' Take:

• A new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that the Small Business Administration could have better supported HBCUs in funding programs and advancing entrepreneurship. 

• How can these relationships improve in the future? How can HBCUs begin to hold SBAs accountable for promised resources? 

• Learn about HBCUs' impact on local communities. 

The Small Business Administration (SBA) may have "missed opportunities" to work toward its goal of supporting historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

A 2017 executive order directed the SBA and other government agencies to prepare​ annual plans to help HBCUs provide quality education, the report notes.  The SBA crafted a plan in 2018 to foster more collaboration between HBCUs and the agency's various local offices. But the SBA has not collected enough data on its efforts to assess the offices' impact due to issues in the plan's execution, the GAO report notes.

The SBA outlined two goals in its 2018 plan: help HBCUs participate in federally funded programs and support more entrepreneurship in underserved markets.

To achieve the latter, the SBA planned to form agreements between HBCUs and its various district offices, many of which offer entrepreneurial training and counseling to college campuses. Such efforts could be critical to helping HBCUs, which have long been underfunded and have seen their enrollments slide over the past decade, except for a slight uptick beginning in 2017.

Some HBCU leaders have been critical of some of the SBA's services. Between 2013 and 2018 the agency signed 35 memorandums with HBCUs to formalize their relationships. But when the GAO contacted six HBCU representatives, three of them said they weren't aware of such agreements or they didn't yield results for their colleges, according to the report.

There's room for improvement in other federal programs that benefit HBCUs as well, previous GAO reports have pointed out.

For instance, the U.S. Department of Education's HBCU Capital Financing Program was designed to help institutions upgrade their facilities. Yet fewer than half of the nation's 101 HBCUs have used the program, even though many have growing backlogs of deferred maintenance, the GAO noted in a 2018 report.

Read the full article about HBCUs by Natalie Schwartz at Education Dive.