The Effect of HBCUs on Local Social Mobility

Greg Howard, Namgyoon Oh and Russell Weinstein
Additional contact information
Greg Howard: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Namgyoon Oh: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

No 18402, IZA Discussion Papers from IZA Network @ LISER

Abstract: We investigate the effects of 4-year public historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) on social mobility of nearby Black and White children. To identify a causal effect, we use the historical fact that many HBCUs began as normal schools to train Black teachers, and we argue that the site selection was similar for insane asylums for Black individuals (as well as all asylums). We find that in recent years Black children from Black normal school counties are 7 percentage points more likely to graduate from college and move up 2 percentiles in the income rankings relative to Black children from control insane asylum counties. We do not see these effects for White children.

Keywords: HBCUs; economic mobility; college access (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I23 I24 J15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-03
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp18402.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp18402

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from IZA Network @ LISER Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Mark Fallak ().