Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/228262 
Year of Publication: 
2020
Series/Report no.: 
Working Paper No. 2020-10
Publisher: 
Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, Atlanta, GA
Abstract: 
This paper investigates differences in outcomes between historically black colleges and universities (HBCU) and traditional college and universities (non-HBCUs) using a standard Oaxaca/Blinder decomposition. This method decomposes differences in observed educational and labor market outcomes between HBCU and non-HBCU students into differences in characteristics (both student and institutional) and differences in how those characteristics translate into differential outcomes. Efforts to control for differences in unobservables between the two types of students are undertaken through inverse-probability weighting and propensity score matching methodologies. We find that differences in student characteristics make the largest contributions to each outcome difference. However, some hope in identifying policy levers comes in the form of how characteristics translate into outcomes. For example, whereas HBCUs appear to be doing a better job helping female graduates parlay their education into higher earnings, non-HBCUs are doing a better job in helping graduates in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics translate their training into higher earnings. Patterns and importance of regressors are similar at different points of the distributions of outcomes.
Subjects: 
HBCU
decomposition
student debt
returns to education
propensity-score matching
inverse-probabilityweighting
quantile regression
JEL: 
I24
I26
C21
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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