How Are Black Colleges Doing? Better Than You Think, Study Finds

In a recent episode of ABC’s black-ish, the two main characters got into a heated debate familiar to many African-American parents of college-age children: Should their son go to an HBCU?

Dre, played by Anthony Anderson, pushed hard for their nerdy son, Junior, to attend Howard University. But Dre’s wife, Bow, disagreed, she said, because years of their son’s being an insufferable nerd got Junior accepted to what she considered a better option: Stanford University.

That meant he could stay closer to their home in Los Angeles, but implicit in Bow’s preference is the prestige and resources that come with a well-regarded, predominantly white institution.

New research may provide a bit of ammunition for those on Dre’s side. Two researchers’ new study of degree attainment at Historically Black Colleges and Universities versus predominantly white institutions, also known, in the study, as PWIs, found that the chances of graduating in six years for black students are significantly higher at the black colleges, when controlling for key variables.

The study, called “Degree Attainment for Black Students at HBCUs and PWIs: A Propensity Score Matching Approach,” found that black students who attend HBCUs are between 6 percent and 16 percent more likely to graduate within six years than those who attend predominantly white institutions.

Ray Franke, an assistant professor of higher education at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, one of the researchers, says HBCUs and PWIs are often pitted against each other. In this debate, Franke says, historically black colleges have gotten the short end of the stick, even from researchers who may mean well. In the new study, Franke notes how a recent report from the Education Trust, a nonprofit that studies disparities for students of color or living in poverty, said that the six-year degree-completion rate for black students at HBCUs is 32 percent, compared with the average rate for black students at all kinds of institutions, 45 percent.

Those figures, he says, don’t adequately take into account systemic differences between students, like socioeconomic status, academic preparation, or institutional disparities in revenues and wealth. He says data that don’t use the correct models may automatically handicap black colleges.

Andrew H. Nichols, senior director at the Education Trust and co-author of the 2017 study cited by Franke, agreed that black colleges are “very different” than most predominantly white institutions. “When you actually compare HBCUs to similar PWIs that enroll comparable percentages of low-income students, our research suggests that HBCUs tend to have higher completion rates for black students,” he said.

Nichols added that the findings of the 2017 report, “A Look at Black Student Success,” were consistent with Franke’s study once the data was limited to low-income, freshman students. For those figures, Nichols’s study found that HBCUs graduate black students at higher rates (38 percent versus 32 percent for comparable PWIs) despite their students’ having lower standardized test scores and greater financial need.

Franke says his study factored in age, gender, average income, location, high-school success, and other factors that he says could paint a more accurate picture of what individual students face, and how HBCUs perform. He says this is the best way to evaluate the success of black students at black colleges.

Historically black colleges can’t really be compared with these other institutions “unless we’re actually comparing the same characteristics,” Franke says. The best research, he says, makes “apples to apples” comparisons.

A Tough Choice

The research comes at a challenging time for historically black colleges. They’ve continued to face declining funding from their states, as well as internal controversies. Recent protests over finances and infrastructure have rocked Howard and Hampton Universities.

Competition for students may make things more difficult. Johnny C. Taylor Jr., a former president of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, the national organization representing black colleges, told The Chronicle that HBCUs are forced to compete with other colleges in many urban centers with a diverse college-age population, like Atlanta.

Taylor, now chief executive of the Society for Human Resource Management, cites Georgia State University as an example where black students may choose a minority-serving institution, even while their friends attend neighboring historically black institutions like Morehouse College and Clark Atlanta University.

He says the battle between predominantly white, minority-serving, and historically black colleges to enroll black students will only become tougher, especially since colleges are aggressively looking to diversify their campuses.

Both Franke and his research partner, Linda T. DeAngelo, an assistant professor of higher education at the University of Pittsburgh, agree that HBCUs are “crucially important for providing black students with access to postsecondary opportunities.” Franke says the study’s findings should prove, once and for all, that black colleges not only compete with white ones to produce desired graduation outcomes, but can even outshine them.

“If we want to increase overall degree-completion numbers, then we ought to allocate resources to those institutions that educate students that have difficulty persisting and graduating,” Franke says. “We’ve seen cuts to HBCUs over the years, so we need better policy.”

Roslyn C. Artis, president of Benedict College, a historically black college in Columbia, S.C., says public and private black colleges have unique challenges, and deteriorating infrastructure is one of them. Artis also says HBCUs often serve disadvantaged students who may not have had an equitable education before enrolling in college.

Their research backs this up, says DeAngelo. She hopes their study shows that blanket negative opinions of black colleges are unfounded.

“Leaders at HBCUs are well aware of the value of their institutions. Hopefully these types of studies will assist HBCUs to get the support they need,” she says. “They’d do even better if they were on a level footing in terms of resources.”

Clarification (4/17/2018, 3:06 p.m.): This article has been updated with a response from Andrew H. Nichols, co-author of the Education Trust report referenced by Ray Franke. The previous version did not include secondary findings from Nichols’s report, which concurred with Franke’s overall findings.