The Role of Historically Black Colleges and Universities in the Educational and Economic Outcomes of Black Students

Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) are an important part of the higher education landscape for Black students. Historically, HBCUs provided access to Black students when many predominantly white institutions were not available to them. Today, Black students have many options when it comes to college attendance, but HBCUs still factor highly in their college choices. For example, even though HBCUs represent only about 3 percent of higher education institutions in the United States, close to 40 percent of Black students who took the SAT applied to an HBCU. This statistic alone demonstrates the importance of our recent study on “HBCU Enrollment and Longer-Term Outcomes” and the corresponding policy implications it reveals.

In this policy brief, we summarize the main results from our research about the impacts of initially enrolling in an HBCU on a variety of educational and economic outcomes for Black students, followed by a discussion on the policy implications. The research makes use of the hundreds of thousands of self-identified Black students who took the SAT and graduated high school between 2004 and 2010. These data provide a more comprehensive picture—in size and scope—of the impacts of enrolling in an HBCU by considering detailed financial and economic outcomes.

We then discuss several policy implications related to HBCUs, including how HBCUs—with relatively little funding—mitigate racial college attainment gaps and how policymakers can better assess colleges’ impacts on students.