Growing up in the same county as a historically Black college or university improves the future economic mobility of Black children, according to a new study from scholars at the University of Illinois.
Many present-day HBCUs began as segregated “normal schools,” institutions opened after the Civil War that were dedicated to training Black teachers to teach Black students. Around the same time, states throughout the southeastern United States also opened segregated mental-health asylums. Since the selection criteria for where a state would choose to open a segregated normal school or a segregated asylum were similar, the authors compared economic data from counties with normal schools to counties with asylums to determine the impact of growing up near a state-funded, historically Black educational institution.
In an analysis of data on children born around 1980, the authors found that Black children from counties with a normal school to train Black teachers were 7 percentage points more likely to graduate from college and move up 2 percentiles in the income rankings relative to Black children from control counties with state-funded asylums. The authors did not see these same effects for White children.
Notably, Black children in asylum counties often had close proximity to a non-historically Black college or university, suggesting that HBCUs in particular have a significantly positive impact on local K-12 education, high school graduation rates, and college preparation for Black students.
“This research helps to quantify HBCUs’ impact on their local communities, which we think should be an important finding for policymakers, especially considering that about half of HBCUs are public universities that are highly dependent on state legislatures for their funding,” said the study’s lead author Russell Weinstein, professor of labor and employment relations and of economics at the University of Illinois.
