Can a College Experience Be ‘Health Protective’?
The health benefits of attending college are well documented. But new research from Cynthia Colen, an associate professor of sociology at Ohio State University, suggests that, for Black students, the type of institution matters.
In a recently published study, Colen and other researchers found that Black people who attended a historically Black college were less likely to develop risk factors for chronic disease later in life than were Black people who attended predominantly white institutions. Specifically, those who attended HBCUs had a 35-percent lower chance of developing metabolic syndrome, a group of conditions — including high blood pressure, excess body fat around the waist, and abnormal cholesterol levels — that increases the risk of diabetes, stroke, and heart disease.
I spoke with Colen about her research and its implications for how higher education might better support Black students. This interview is edited for clarity and brevity.
Why focus on metabolic syndrome as an indicator of health?
Racial disparities in health tend to grow at the most rapid pace during midlife: late 30s, 40s, 50s. They don’t emerge at older ages. We focused on metabolic syndrome because one of the drivers of expanding racial disparities in midlife is chronic disease — conditions such as obesity, diabetes, and hypertension. These conditions set the seeds for mortality in later years. One way to capture this growth in chronic disease is looking at metabolic syndrome.
How significant is the health benefit for Black people of attending an HBCU versus a primarily white institution?
Our study showed that HBCU attendees had a 35-percent reduction in the odds of developing metabolic syndrome in midlife compared with predominantly white institution attendees. I was surprised to see such a significant finding. That was after we controlled for a whole host of potential confounding factors, like family disadvantage, school disadvantage, neighborhood disadvantage, or indicators of poor health in childhood, such as diabetes or obesity. The reduction in metabolic syndrome associated with attending an HBCU is similar to the health benefits of eating more nutritious foods or engaging in rigorous exercise.
I know the data don’t explain why or how the risk of metabolic syndrome is lower for HBCU students, but do you have any theories?
My biggest research question I’m hoping to follow up on, with a different data set or primary data collection, is whether attending an HBCU is health protective for African Americans because it shields people — at least somewhat, but not completely — from exposure to racial discrimination. That’s one possibility, that it’s about exposure to discrimination. Another possibility is that we know HBCUs — and this is also true of community colleges and public state schools — are huge drivers of upward mobility, much more so than prestigious four-year colleges and universities. And one of the effects of upward mobility is better health outcomes.
Would it be fair to say your research indicates there’s something about the environment itself at PWIs that is detrimental to Black students’ health?
That’s fair to say. I like to put a slightly more positive spin on it, focusing on the potential health benefits of attending HBCUs. But yes, one thing we know — and some of my previous research shows this, as do other researchers in my field — is that exposing people to discrimination has a negative impact on their health, both at the time those exposures occur and across the life course. That’s well established in the literature.
What does your research tell us about how higher education can better support Black students?
One thing this paper can do is show that the beneficial effects of HBCU attendance for African Americans go beyond just educational attainment or social mobility. This paper suggests that going to an HBCU can be health protective. At a time when we’re seeing a lot of cuts to higher education, and we’re seeing a lot of colleges and universities struggle to stay afloat during the Covid-19 crisis, this suggests that we need to double down on our financial support of HBCUs.
It also feels like a powerful argument for more diversity in higher education, because PWIs can’t fulfill their stated missions of caring equally for the health of all students until they become more diverse.
I would push it further. I absolutely support more diversity among PWIs and all institutions of higher learning. Diversity is a wonderful thing. It opens students, faculty, and staff to the fact that people have such different life experiences, and it gets them outside of their bubbles. But it’s not just about increasing diversity. In higher education, we need to think about policies and structural changes that can protect and support our students of color and our faculty of color.
What would some of those policies or structural changes look like?
We can look at minority-faculty recruitment, and especially retention. How can we retain faculty of color and ensure that they move through the ranks? And the same for students of color. A lot of predominantly white institutions do a good job in recruitment, but we know that graduation rates are significantly lower among many students of color than for white students. This means we need to look beyond just bringing people in and think about how we can change the environment to be more supportive, whether that’s mentoring faculty of color or just working on the environment for students. —Vimal Patel
