Reported hate crimes have increased rapidly in recent years, including on college campuses. Concurrently, general racial animus has increased in the United States. 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 crimes incidents relate to the college enrollment of students of color. This lack of evidence is especially troubling for Black persons, the most frequent targets of reported hate crimes both on and off campus. This paper helps to fill in that gap by exploring the association between Black students’ college enrollment and the number of reports of hate crimes at two levels: the state and the institution. We examine a comprehensive dataset of institutional enrollment and characteristics, reported hate crimes, and Census data on state racial demographics from 1999 to 2017 using several techniques including institution fixed effects. We find that a standard deviation increase in reports of state-level hate crimes predicts a 20% increase in Black first-time student enrollment at HBCUs. As the number of reported hate crimes is almost assuredly an undercount of the actual number of incidents, we explore the implications of this work while keeping that limitation in mind.
