The Earnings Effect of Black Matriculation in Predominantly White Colleges

This study attempts to ascertain the extent to which the narrowing earnings differential between black and white males with college education is caused, as some have suggested, by the matriculation of blacks in predominantly white colleges and universities. To examine this question, a relatively new and little-used data base created and maintained by the Project TALENT Data Bank is used. The data used are for a group of persons who were in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grades in 1960 and who later reported data on their earnings eleven years after their high school graduation. Four hourly earnings functions were estimated: one for all black males, one for all white males, and then one each for black males who attended one of the traditionally black colleges and universities and for black males who attended one of the predominantly white colleges and universities. The analysis shows that the total effects of college study, at each of the examined levels, were very nearly the same, thus refuting the “white-college hypothesis.”