Despite Obstacles, Black Colleges Are Pipelines to the Middle Class, Study Finds. Here’s Its List of the Best.

Brian Finke, Redux

Historically black colleges and universities have far smaller endowments and a far larger share of low-income students than predominantly white institutions do. Yet black colleges raise students up the ladder of economic success at rates comparable to white colleges, according to a study to be released on Monday by the Rutgers Center for Minority Serving Institutions.

A report on the study, drawing on data from the Opportunity Insights project at Harvard University, compared the trajectories of students who attended 50 HBCUs against those who went to mostly white institutions in the same regions. Two-thirds of HBCU students from low-income families, meaning those with household incomes of roughly $25,000 or less, ended up earning at least middle-class incomes by their early to mid-30s. Seventy percent of low-income students at mostly white colleges reached the middle class or higher by that age, according to the report, “Moving Upward and Onward: Income Mobility at Historically Black Colleges and Universities.”

Over all, almost 70 percent of HBCU students achieved what the researchers describe as incomes that are middle class or higher.

The notion that black colleges are pipelines to the middle class will not surprise people who work at the institutions, which have been serving that role for generations. Still, the research team — a multi-institution collaboration led by Robert A. Nathenson of the University of Pennsylvania — presented its findings as an empirical validation for a segment of higher education that has long been forced to defend itself against outside critics. HBCUs, the report notes, face funding cuts, doubts about their value, and questions about the constitutionality of their federal funding. Critics portray HBCUs as “anachronistic appendages of a racist past,” as one of the report’s authors, Marybeth Gasman of Rutgers, has written.

But the report, while validating HBCUs, also identifies a troubling counter-trend facing their graduates. For students who come from higher-income families, a “stark difference” exists between blacks’ and whites’ ability to maintain privilege across generations, said Nathenson, a sociologist employed as a research specialist with the Consortium for Policy Research in Education at Penn’s Graduate School of Education. Better-off HBCU students have a 50-percent chance of replicating their parents’ affluence, the study found. Students from white colleges have a 60-percent chance.

That difference probably results from the structural racism of American life, Nathenson argued, rather than factors tied to the colleges. Earlier studies have also identified the “difficulty African American families face maintaining socioeconomic gains across generations,” Nathenson noted. For example, 60 percent of white people who have a parent with a four-year college degree also go on to earn such a degree, according to an analysis published this year by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; the figure for African Americans is 34 percent.

An Uphill Climb

The HBCU study comes as colleges nationwide face growing scrutiny over their performance as engines of mobility. The focus has been propelled, in part, by the work of Raj Chetty and other economists affiliated with Harvard’s Opportunity Insights (formerly the Equality of Opportunity Project). Those researchers, using federal tax data and other records for more than 30 million students, created Mobility Report Cards that show how well colleges do at enrolling low-income students and vaulting them to prosperity.

The new study offers a slightly less rosy picture than an earlier HBCU mobility report that also used Chetty’s data. That analysis, by the American Council on Education, found that HBCUs had higher upward-mobility rates than did non-minority-serving institutions.

Nathenson and his colleagues report, similarly, that overall upward mobility is about 50 percent higher at HBCUs than at predominantly white institutions. But that pattern stems from the fact that HBCUs have a much larger share of students starting at the economic bottom. Twenty-four percent of HBCU students come from low-income families, against 8 percent at predominantly white institutions, or PWIs.

A more candid way to examine the data is to compare only students whose families have similar incomes, Nathenson said. From that perspective, 14 percent of HBCU students from low-income families reach the top earnings bracket, compared with 22 percent of low-income students at white colleges. Almost 24 percent of low-income HBCU students attain the next-highest bracket, against 26 percent at white colleges.

“Fewer low-income HBCU students experience rags-to-riches type mobility than their PWI peers,” the report says. “Given the far greater institutional resources at PWIs, this is not altogether surprising.”

Models of Mobility

The report also highlights certain black colleges that do especially well at furthering mobility, including Dillard University, Tuskegee University, and Xavier University of Louisiana. Gasman suggested that other institutions concerned about the success of their low-income students and students of color should look to such places as models.

Xavier, for example, is a Roman Catholic HBCU known for educating a disproportionate share of black students who go on to become doctors. Sixty-five percent of its students receive federal Pell Grants. Nearly 17 percent of its students fall into the lowest-income group in the new report. Yet nearly 80 percent of those low-income students reach at least the middle class, the study found, compared with an average of 70 percent at mostly white colleges.

What those statistics mean, at the ground level, is that Xavier’s lower-income students must juggle classes with the stress of paying the university’s $22,000 tuition. Students sometimes cobble together those payments from multiple family members’ contributions and from working long hours at a job, said Stassi DiMaggio, a professor of chemistry at the university.

DiMaggio chalked up Xavier’s success in part to a campus culture devoted to nurturing rather than weeding out students. This often takes practical forms. In foundational chemistry courses, for example, professors teach from the same book. Their syllabi include office hours of all faculty members teaching the course, so students can ask any professor for help, not just their own. Professors use grading systems that give students incentives to help peers rather than see them as rivals. Professors also require students to take supplemental drill classes that feature weekly tests, so problems are spotted early.

Other institutions frequently solicit Xavier professors’ advice on how to help their own students of color do better, DiMaggio said. But those conversations can be frustrating.

“We start to tell them, Well, we do this and this and this,” DiMaggio said. “And they go, Oh, OK, and you have grad students do that? And we say, No, there are no grad students here, we do that. And they say, Oh, well, that’s just too much work. And we say, We’re not even half done. Sit down and make yourself comfortable.”

Marc Parry writes about scholars and the work they do. Follow him on Twitter @marcparry, or email him at marc.parry@chronicle.com.