For a generation of Black Americans, A Different World did something television still struggles to do nearly 40 years later: It allowed Black college students to simply exist at the center of the story. They studied, dated, pledged, protested, made terrible decisions, worried about money, fell in love and figured out who they wanted to become. The show tackled race, class, sexism, politics and colorism, but its Black characters didn’t have to spend every episode explaining their Blackness to a predominantly white world. At Hillman College, Black life wasn’t a subplot or a diversity initiative. It was the entire world.
The original A Different World premiered in 1987 and ran for six seasons, ending in 1993. Set at the fictional historically Black Hillman College, the series became one of television’s defining portrayals of Black higher education. Its cultural impact extended beyond entertainment. A later academic study of 265 HBCU students found that exposure to Black media, including A Different World and The Cosby Show, made a statistically significant contribution to HBCU college choice among the women surveyed.
More than three decades after the original series ended, however, television’s portrayal of Black college life remains surprisingly thin. Even during an era when streaming services dramatically expanded the amount of scripted television being produced, the number of prominent shows substantially centered on Black college students can practically be counted on one hand.
A Decade of Television, and Only a Handful of Shows
Looking at major American scripted television from roughly 2016 through 2026, five prominent series stand out for making Black college students and their experiences central or substantially central to their stories: The Quad, Dear White People, grown-ish, All American: Homecoming and the newly revived A Different World.
Even five requires a fairly broad definition of a Black college show. Dear White People followed primarily Black students at Winchester University, a fictional predominantly white Ivy League institution. Netflix’s adaptation ran for four seasons from 2017 through 2021 and used the campus to explore race, activism, relationships, identity and the complicated experiences of Black students navigating an elite white institution.
grown-ish, the black-ish spinoff starring Yara Shahidi and later Marcus Scribner, also placed Black students at the center of its story without being specifically about an HBCU. Zoey Johnson entered the fictional Cal U surrounded by a deliberately multiracial group of friends, allowing the show to explore college through race, relationships, drugs, sexuality, academics and the confusion of early adulthood. It became the longest-running recent example, lasting six seasons and more than 100 episodes before ending in 2024.
Narrow the question specifically to scripted television centered on HBCUs, however, and the list becomes startlingly short. During that same period, the clearest major examples are The Quad, All American: Homecoming and the new A Different World.
The Quad Tried to Build an Entire HBCU World
BET’s The Quad premiered in 2017 and attempted something unusually ambitious. Instead of using an HBCU as colorful scenery, the drama built its entire fictional world around Georgia A&M University. Students, administrators, faculty members, athletics, marching bands, finances and campus politics all became part of the story, giving viewers a look at an institution rather than simply a collection of young Black characters.
The experiment didn’t last long. BET canceled The Quad after two seasons and 19 episodes in 2018. According to reporting at the time, its first season averaged roughly 802,000 same-day viewers, while the second averaged about 553,000, a decline of approximately 31%.
Its cancellation meant that one of television’s few fictional HBCU campuses disappeared almost as quickly as it had arrived. For several years afterward, there again wasn’t a major scripted television series built primarily around contemporary HBCU students.
All American: Homecoming Gave It Another Shot
That changed when All American: Homecoming premiered on The CW in 2022. Set at fictional Bringston University in Atlanta, the series followed Simone Hicks and other students through athletics, friendships, relationships, academics and the pressures surrounding an HBCU trying to preserve its identity and traditions.
What was particularly revealing was how the show’s creators discussed its existence. Showrunner Nkechi Okoro Carroll told the Los Angeles Times that she wanted audiences to understand that the HBCU experience was worthy of being “the A story.” The newspaper also pointed to a disparity so familiar that many viewers probably don’t notice it: elite predominantly white colleges regularly appear in American entertainment, while historically Black colleges are rarely allowed to become the primary setting.
All American: Homecoming ultimately lasted three seasons before The CW canceled it in 2024. Once again, television lost one of its extremely small number of fictional worlds built specifically around Black students at an HBCU.
These Students Actually Exist by the Hundreds of Thousands
The scarcity becomes more striking when compared with the actual size of the HBCU community. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 99 HBCUs enrolled approximately 289,000 students in fall 2022, including roughly 219,000 Black students. HBCUs themselves are also more diverse than their popular image sometimes suggests, with students from different races, nationalities, economic backgrounds and regions attending them.
That population contains enough material for dozens of completely different television shows. There are first-generation students arriving on campus alongside students whose parents and grandparents attended the same university. There are wealthy Black students meeting classmates struggling to pay rent, queer students discovering themselves, international students encountering Black American culture, student athletes balancing sports and academics, aspiring entrepreneurs building businesses from their dorm rooms and students trying to navigate fraternities, sororities, religion, politics, colorism, class and relationships.
An HBCU series doesn’t even have to be explicitly “about race” to tell a distinctly Black story. That’s part of what made A Different World so effective. Because Blackness was the default at Hillman, individual characters could disagree with one another without being asked to represent all Black people. They could be conservative or progressive, wealthy or working class, Southern or Northern, light-skinned or dark-skinned, socially awkward or popular. Their differences became the story.
That’s an enormous storytelling advantage, yet television has rarely taken advantage of it.
Black Students at White Colleges Haven’t Exactly Flooded Television Either
Expanding the definition beyond HBCUs doesn’t suddenly reveal dozens of forgotten programs. Dear White People remains one of the most direct examinations of Black students navigating a predominantly white elite university, while grown-ish offered something equally valuable but considerably lighter: Black young adults getting the opportunity to be messy, funny, irresponsible, romantic and confused.
That distinction matters because representation isn’t always about producing a lesson. Sometimes Black college students should be able to have the same ridiculous roommate fights, disastrous hookups, terrible professors, embarrassing parties and questionable decisions that television has long allowed other young characters to experience.
Television certainly understands the storytelling potential of college. Dorm rooms, fraternities and sororities, athletics, professors, campus scandals, class differences, sex, drinking and the sudden freedom of young adulthood have been reliable material for generations. More recent programs such as Tell Me Lies and The Sex Lives of College Girls demonstrate that television hasn’t abandoned college as a setting.
The difference is whose college experience gets to define the world.
A show can include a Black roommate, friend or athlete and still not be a story about Black college life. Representation inside somebody else’s campus story isn’t the same thing as constructing a television universe where Black students occupy the center.
And Now We’re Going Back to Hillman
On Sept. 24, 2026, Netflix returned to one of television’s most famous fictional Black colleges with a new version of A Different World. The series follows Deborah Wayne, the daughter of original characters Dwayne Wayne and Whitley Gilbert, as she enrolls at Hillman alongside a new generation of students.
Netflix has described that ensemble as reflecting the breadth of Black life on campus, with characters including a first-generation criminal justice major, an athlete, a psychology student, a small-town student and a Ghanaian-Nigerian fashion entrepreneur. There is something genuinely exciting about returning to Hillman and introducing the concept to viewers who weren’t alive when the original series aired.
There’s also something revealing about the fact that television had to go back there.
Hollywood increasingly relies on recognizable intellectual property, so reviving a beloved television brand makes commercial sense. Culturally, though, the revival raises a more uncomfortable question: Why did television have to resurrect a fictional Black college created in 1987 to once again make Black college life a major television event?
Thirty-nine years after A Different World premiered, we’re returning to Hillman partly because television never built enough Hillmans to follow it.
An Entire Generation of Stories Happened Anyway
The absence becomes especially noticeable when considering everything Black college students experienced while television largely looked elsewhere. They went through the Obama presidency, the rise of Black Lives Matter, the political upheaval of the Trump years and a pandemic that emptied campuses and transformed college education almost overnight. They navigated escalating tuition, student debt, housing costs and inflation while social media completely changed dating, friendships, activism and campus culture.
HBCUs themselves experienced renewed national attention. Homecoming culture exploded across social media. Beyoncé’s 2018 Coachella performance brought HBCU-inspired marching bands, majorette traditions and Black college aesthetics before an enormous global audience. At the same time, HBCUs faced very real challenges involving finances, infrastructure, enrollment, campus safety and bomb threats.
Those developments could have produced comedies, dramas, romances, mysteries, political shows, sports series and coming-of-age stories. Instead, most passed without a sustained fictional television universe documenting what it felt like to be a Black student living through them.
That’s an enormous missed opportunity because college stories are ultimately stories about possibility. Their characters haven’t completely become who they’re going to be yet. They’re choosing careers, forming political identities, meeting people outside their families, falling in love, failing classes, changing their minds and learning that adulthood looks nothing like what they expected.
When Black students are largely absent from that genre, audiences lose more than representation. They lose images of Black people at one of the most transformative stages of their lives.
Representation Also Means Where Black People Get to Exist
Television doesn’t have a shortage of Black characters. Audiences regularly see Black police officers, lawyers, doctors, detectives, politicians, parents, musicians, athletes and criminals. Some of those portrayals are excellent, and many have expanded what Black representation on television can look like.
But representation isn’t simply a matter of counting Black faces. Where Black characters are allowed to exist matters too.
A Black college campus offers a setting where Black characters can have conflicts that originate within their own community instead of constantly positioning them in relation to white characters. Race can still matter enormously, but it doesn’t have to explain every interaction. Class, sexuality, religion, nationality, politics, ambition and personality can move forward because Blackness is already understood as part of the environment.
That’s what Hillman demonstrated nearly four decades ago. The remarkable thing isn’t that A Different World worked. It’s that television produced so few successors after having such a clear example of what was possible.
There are still 99 HBCUs in the United States and hundreds of thousands of students attending them. Millions more Black students attend predominantly white institutions and other colleges across the country. Yet during an era when the number of television series exploded across broadcast, cable and streaming, only a small group of prominent scripted programs made Black college students fundamental to their worlds.
Under the broader definition, we keep returning to the same handful of names: The Quad, Dear White People, grown-ish, All American: Homecoming and now A Different World. Narrow the focus specifically to contemporary HBCU-centered scripted television, and the list gets even shorter.
That doesn’t mean no independent production, web series, reality program or television show has featured Black college students during the past decade. It means major scripted television has rarely decided that their lives were substantial enough to build an entire world around.
Black students never stopped going to college. HBCUs never stopped producing stories worth telling. Black young adults never stopped falling in love, fighting with roommates, joining organizations, struggling financially, questioning their beliefs, finding themselves and preparing for whatever came after graduation.
Television simply hasn’t spent much time watching them do it.
Nearly four decades after America first went to Hillman, we’re walking onto that campus again. It’s good to be back. But this time, Hollywood shouldn’t need another generation to build somewhere else for Black students to go.
