Apropos of everything, sharing my newly published @StanfordCEPA working paper, co-authored with the fabulous @TolaniBritton, focused on reports of hate crimes & Black college student enrollment. 1/12 @SMU @smusimmons @UCBerkeley
https://cepa.stanford.edu/content/hate-crimes-and-black-college-student-enrollment

We explore the relationship between sociopolitical racial animus, proxied by reported hate crimes, and total vs. Black student enrollment at HBCUs using nearly 2 decades of data. Focus on different groups of hate crime reports: all, race-based, and anti-Black. 2/12

Prior research and theory provide evidence that, in times of increased animus, Black students are likely to seek out physically and mentally safe environments, which may lead them to enroll at HBCUs at a higher rate. 3/12

Cannot stress enough that we realize reports of hate crimes are incredibly imperfect measures. We are explicit about this fact and view the estimates presented in the working paper as lower bounds of the relationship. 4/12

Accepting those limitations, we estimated several models with our preferred specification including reports of hate crimes interacted with HBCU status, state characteristics like share of residents who are Black, and institution fixed effects. 5/12

We find that an increase in statewide reports of hate crimes (total, race-based, or anti-Black) predicts an increase of Black student first-time enrollment at HBCUs (1 sd increase predicts approximately 20% additional Black students). 6/12

Also find that increases in reports of race-based or anti-Black hate crimes predict a decrease in Black students' enrollment in non-HBCUs. 7/12

Explored same models year-by-year. Below are the estimates of the association between reports of anti-Black hate crimes & total (left) or Black (right) first-time enrollment. Just an example, pattern generally holds across all combinations. 8/12

While there's little pattern for non-HBCUs, HBCUs show a stronger relationship between reports of hate crimes & enrollment around and directly after the election of President Obama. 9/12

This is getting long so I'll say we also explore institutional reports of hate crimes, total enrollment as the outcome (instead of first-time enrollment). We also estimate the models for all institutions and only for institutions in states with at least 1 HBCU. 10/12

It's useful to understand how macro-level intolerance and oppression is related to institutional enrollment decisions as a first step to higher education institutions working to actively create welcoming campus environments where all students can thrive while feeling safe. 11/12

We welcome feedback/suggestions! And we appreciate the constructive comments from @btskinner @GandaraDenisa @SNBarringer and the @ASHEoffice & @NYUWagner attendees of presentations of this work. 12/12

And, in case you were wondering, a 20% increase in first-time Black students would equal roughly 33 additional students based on the average in our sample. We explain all that and more in the paper!