The purpose of this study was to document the economic role of the nation's historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) by estimating the short-term economic impact that each of these institutions has on their local communities. In this study, short-term economic impact was defined as the change in overall economic activity in the institutions's community that is associated with four important categories of college/university-related expenditures, salaries, other institutional expenditures, and the expenditures of undergraduate and separately, graduate and professional students attending the institution. The IMPLAN (Impact Analysis for Planning) Professional Version 2.0 modeling system was used to build regional models for each of the 101 HBCUs in the 50 states and the District of Columbia and to calculate multipliers for estimating the HBCUs' impact in terms of output, value-added, labor income, and employment. These multipliers were applied to each institution's salary, staff, enrollment and expenditure data from the 2001 Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) and data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey. In 2001, the combined initial spending associated with the nation's 101 HBCUs totaled $6.6 billion. Public HBCUs accounted for 62 percent of the total amount. The total economic impact of the nation's HBCUs was $10.2 billion with 35 percent due to the multiplier effect. This amount would rank the collective economic impact of the nation's HBCUs 232nd on the Forbes Fortune 500 list of the United States' largest companies (Fortune Magazine, 2006). Additionally, the total employment impact of the 101 HBCUs included 180,142 total (initial and induced) full- and part-time jobs in 2001. The report includes templates that can easily be used to update impact estimates for subsequent years as new IPEDS data become available.
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