Hate Crimes and Black College Student Enrollment

Reported hate crimes in the United States have increased rapidly in recent years, alongside an increase in general racial animus. Scholars have shown that the larger sociopolitical environment can directly impact the campus climate and experiences of all students, particularly students of color. However, little is known about how reports of hate crime incidents relate to college enrollment levels of students of color. This lack of evidence has especially troubling implications for Black people, the most frequent targets of reported hate crimes. This paper helps to fill in that gap by exploring the association between the number of reports of hate crimes within states and Black students’ college enrollment. We examine a comprehensive dataset of institutional enrollment and characteristics, reported hate crimes, and census data on state racial demographics from 2000 to 2017 using several techniques, including institution fixed effects. We find that a 1 standard deviation increase in reports of state-level hate crimes predicts a 17 to 22 percent increase in Black first-time student enrollment at historically Black colleges and universities. As the number of reported hate crimes is almost assuredly an undercount of the actual number of incidents, we explore the implications of what these results mean.