Are Historically Black Colleges Worth It?
Some scholars suggest that the “unique educational services” once provided by HBCUs to Black students have now disappeared.
By Dwayne Ashley
Economists Drs. Roland Fryer of Harvard University and Michael Greenstone of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently undertook a dense statistical analysis, which concluded that attending historically Black colleges and universities may once have conferred a “wage advantage” for African-American graduates compared to those graduating from majority White institutions — but no longer.
But do the data actually support such a conclusion? Or the Fryer-Greenstone suggestion that the “unique educational services” once provided by HBCUs to Black students have now disappeared? Hardly.
Higher education costs money, lots of it, as any family with college-bound children can attest. But calculating the value of a college education can be a tricky business and, when measured by a single set of criteria, fundamentally misleading.
