ZACH BLIZARD: HBCUs enhance economic mobility

What is one of the best ways for someone from a low-income family to climb the economic ladder and achieve higher social and economic mobility? Our research, based on Harvard data, suggests that attending and graduating from a Historically Black College or University is an efficient engine to achieve these goals. Nationwide, HBCUs have higher percentages of their low-income students achieving upward mobility than non-HBCUs.

Take Jonathan Lindsay, the first in his family to attend college when he arrived at Winston-Salem State University. He graduated in 1996 with a degree in computer science. Now, Lindsay who grew up in a two-bedroom apartment, is an operations manager with Microsoft in Charlotte.  The mother who raised him lives in his house, Lindsay said, and one of his two children is a student at N.C. Central University in Durham.

“Winston-Salem State definitely helped me get to where I am, and I am pleased to see that others are doing the same thing,” said Lindsay, who is 47.

Of the 2,203 universities and colleges nationwide with mobility estimates, WSSU is in the 88th percentile for the upward mobility of low-income students, and 5th among all North Carolina colleges and universities for upward economic mobility among its graduates. The state’s HBCUs lead in that statewide ranking, with seven of them in the top ten. The top ten schools, in order, are listed in the table below.

In our research on this subject, we analyzed publicly available data related to upward mobility rates for universities and colleges from Opportunity Insights, a research organization at Harvard. These estimates show the percentage of colleges’ graduates from families in the bottom quintile of the income distribution who reached the top 20 percent of the distribution later in life after they graduated.

When we rank the schools in North Carolina from highest to lowest, we see that HBCUs are heavily concentrated towards the top of the list. Moreover, the difference in average percentage between HBCUs and non-HBCUs in the state shows that the former is 1.8 percentage points higher than the latter, with the difference being statistically significant.

Lindsay noted that one reason for the high rate of mobility is that many HBCU students “have a lot further to go. Someone paying $80,000 annually to attend Wake Forest is probably OK economically.”

Guidance counselors at South Mecklenburg High School led him to WSSU, he said, where he had a full scholarship. He majored in computer science.   Lindsay, the area operations manager for Microsoft Business Operations in Charlotte, continues to build social mobility for WSSU grads by creating a pipeline for WSSU graduates to work at his company.

“It’s all about who you know, and there is no way around that,” Lindsay said. “I got to my opportunity here not because of what I know but because someone could introduce me to someone tin this space. The key is to take advantage when opportunity meets preparation.”

The numbers suggest that meeting is happening at HBCUs nationwide.