The United Negro College Fund (UNCF) and Diverse: Issues In Higher Education held a Twitter town hall on Thursday to discuss UNCF’s latest report, HBCUs Transforming Generations: Social Mobility Outcomes for HBCU Alumni.
The report quantifies the social mobility experienced by students who attend historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), and how these institutions have contributed to the advancement and livelihood of Black and low-income families.
Dr. Michael L. Lomax
Using data from Opportunity Insights, a nonprofit and non-partisan research and policy institute based out of Harvard University, UNCF revealed that over half of all institutions in the 95th percentile of providing social mobility into the middle class were HBCU schools. In fact, all but six HBCUs scored higher than the 90th percentile of social mobility.
This means that HBCUs are able to effectively uplift their students from some of the lowest earning to some of the highest earning sectors of the American economy.
To find out exactly how successful HBCUs have been at providing social mobility, UNCF studied the access and success rate of all U.S. institutions. Access is an assessment of the percentage of students able to attend an institution whose family income is less than $46,000 per year, otherwise defined as the bottom 20% of earners. Success is defined by the percentage of students from that bottom 20% who were able to earn a higher level of income after graduation.
