Research & Studies

A new study from the Center for American Progress finds that for the first time in American history, half of the young adults in the United States have earned a college degree. However, there hasn’t been a great deal of progress in closing the large and persistent racial equity gap.

More than a quarter of the excess deaths during the pandemic were not from the virus itself but the result of not seeking or finding adequate care in an emergency such as a heart attack, experiencing fatal complications from a chronic disease such as diabetes, or facing a behavioral health crisis that led to suicide or drug overdose.

New data from the National Science Foundation show that in pre-pandemic America enrollments in graduate programs in science, engineering, and health fields at U.S. academic institutions were increasing. The increase in Black enrollments in these disciplines increased faster than the rate for enrollments as a whole.

The new report presents the results of a survey of Black professors at the main and satellite campuses of Penn State regarding their experiences with racism, on the institutional and interpersonal levels, perpetrated by students, colleagues, administrators as well as the academic culture in which they work.

The study found that during the pandemic, African Americans may have had worse access than Whites to outpatient care and thus were less likely to avoid hospitalizations for non-COVID-19–related conditions. This increased African Americans' risk of hospital-acquired infections, the researchers say.

The chronic stress of living in neighborhoods with high rates of violence and poverty alters gene activity in immune cells, according to a new study of low-income single Black mothers on the South Side of Chicago conducted by researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the University of Kentucky and the University of California, Los Angeles.

Scholars affiliated with the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University, the College of Arts and Humanities at the University of Maryland, the MATRIX Center for Digital Humanities & Social Sciences at Michigan State University, and other institutions have established a new open-source database called Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade.

The study, from the nonprofit newsroom The Markup, found that more than 500 universities across the country use risk algorithms to evaluate their students. The analysis found "large disparities in how the software treats students of different races, and the disparity is particularly stark for Black students, who were deemed high risk at as much as quadruple the rate of their White peers."

The Center for Economic and Social Research at the University of Southern California has released a new report on how Americans are dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. The report breaks down several survey responses by racial and ethnic group. Results show that Black Americans take social distancing far more seriously than White Americans.

A new study led by Isaac Agboola, a third-year emergency room resident at Yale New Haven Medical Center, examines how bias influences emergency department treatment, particularly decisions over which patients must be restrained and/or sedated.

After interviewing campus housing administrators, staff, and students at three major universities, Zak Foste of the University of Kansas found that students of color who lived in predominantly White facilities commonly reported not feeling welcome, being uncomfortable with roommates, and avoiding spending time in their residence.

According to the study, led by a sociologist at Cornell University, the average district to expand charter school enrollment between 2000 and 2010 experienced a 12 percent increase in White-Black school segregation and a 2 percent decrease in White-Black residential segregation.

For many decades the Black unemployment rate has traditionally been double the rate for Whites.  This racial gap existed in both good economic times and bad with only slight fluctuations in the ratio. After the pandemic hit, the Black rate was only 1.2 times the rate for Whites. Since then the racial gap has reappeared.

Among the most startling statistics in the new report from The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida is that while Blacks are more than 53 percent of the athletes in Division I basketball, African Americans are 22.7 percent of the head coaches, down from 25.2 percent 15 years ago.

Researchers at Boston College and the University of Connecticut have authored a new study that finds that college students of color who encounter online racism can experience real and significant mental health impacts – even more significant than in-person encounters of racial discrimination.

For the years 2015 to 2019, on average 21.6 percent of African Americans over the age of 25 held a bachelor's degree. For non-Hispanic Whites, the figure was 35.8 percent. This racial gap is slightly large than was the case in the period from 2005 to 2009.

A new study of more than 133 million tweets on Twitter from 2013 to 2015 conducted by researchers at Brown University and Harvard University finds that in most urban areas, people of different races don’t just live in different neighborhoods — they also eat, drink, shop, socialize and travel in different neighborhoods.

As with the deaths that were directly caused by the virus, those linked to unemployment have taken a disproportionate toll on Black people, especially those with the least education. Black people make up 12 percent of the working-age population, but they comprised 19 percent of the projected excess deaths due to higher unemployment during the pandemic.

For non-Hispanic White high school graduates in 2019, 47.9 percent had enrolled in four-year colleges and universities by October of that year. For 2019 Black high school graduates, less than 32 percent had enrolled in four-year colleges and universities by the ensuing fall.

A new study led by researchers at Harvard Medical School shows that had reparations for slavery been awarded to African Americans prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the racial disparity in infections, hospitalizations, and death rates due to the virus would have been significantly reduced or eliminated.