HBCUs drive upward mobility for low-income students far better than elites do

Evidence

Two-thirds of low-income students at HBCUs end up in at least the middle class, and nearly 70 percent of all HBCU students do the same. At Emory, in contrast, a 2017 report noted that only 13 percent of students moved up two or more income quintiles, and only 1.8 percent moved from the bottom to the top. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 298

Categorization

• XREF: Directly rebuts the meritocratic assumption behind elite private-university tax benefits under discussion.
• SEED: Statistic for an article on how tax-advantaged elite endowments fail at mobility while HBCUs succeed.