Global Journal of Management and Business Research, B: Economics and Commerce, Volume 22 Issue 4

6 Global Journal of Management and Business Research Volume XXII Issue IV Version I Year 2022 ( ) B © 2022 Global Journals Racial and Community Wealth Disparity the Bane of HBCUs: A Wealth Ecology Model Relational Perspective enrollment levels by household wealth, the Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) method is used. Many proxies have been used to measure wealth. Here, the wealth of African American households is estimated by the median household wealth as published by the SCF. This measure of wealth is used to measure student wealth status. The data represents a comprehensive measure of all reportable and measurable aspects of a family’s wealth and therefore has the strongest indication of an individual student’s wealth status. It represents most of the elements of wealth. Wealth accumulation occurs along the various dimensions of wealth. Each wealth dimension or type may have a differential influence on students’ perception of wealth or their liquidity potential to support their intent to attend higher education. The types of wealth accumulation applied here are the major elements of the median household wealth as published by the SCF. See Table C.1in Appendix C for the applied elements. Student choice of a school leads to enrollment rolls of schools and using this measure as an indication of students’ choice behavior should provide an excellent fit. Sissoko and Shiau (2005) established that even though non-African Americans' proportion in HBCU enrollment increased in proportion to HBCU total enrollment, the proportion of African Americans held steady. This allows enrollment levels to be generalized to African American enrollment change without loss of accuracy. c) Data Analysis The objective of this study is to understand how HBCU students’ wealth status influences their behavioral choice of HBCUs for higher education attendance. The first hypothesis focuses on how the median household wealth of African American students influences their HBCU enrollment patterns which is a directional correlation investigation. The second is whether school choice is influenced more by specific wealth accumulation types and this portents to a correlational size effect determination. On the first hypothesis H a , based on the sample data obtained from the survey results sourced from NCES and the SCF, the regression analysis between the dependent variable, African Americans (AA) HBCU enrollment and the independent variable, African American median household wealth (net worth) is performed. As a basis for this analysis, it is assumed that school choice is made on the perception of family income. This necessitates the assumption that at year 0, the enrollment effect of current year perceived wealth status would determine year one (1) enrollment intention. The result leads to the following regression relationship: = 0 + 1 ∗ −1 ∀ ∈ (1,10) ……… Eq. 1 where i is year i, the antecedent X is African American student (median household) income, and the outcome Y as African American students (AA HBCU) annual enrollment. Β 0 and β 1 are the regression coefficients. To test the relationship in Eq. (01), ten dataset points were selected from the two databases CFS and NCES matching the periodic survey years between 1989 and 2017 with the networth data selected a year ahead of the enrollment years. That is, for the starting year of 1990, the income dataset is selected at year 1989 to align with the enrollment dataset in year 1990. The combined data set is presented in Table A.3 (a & b) in appendix A. Since a directional and strength of correlational relationship investigation is being conducted, Ordinary Least Squares regression analysis is used to process the data with SPSS software. To account for a possible biasing of the net worth effect, the average national median and the non-African American students’ net worth data were collected. This helps to understand if there is any moderating effect from the national wealth trend. For the second hypothesis, H b the same sample data obtained from the survey results from NCES and the CFS as applied in the previous analysis is used. There are multiple independent variables representing African American wealth accumulation elements that combined to produce the median wealth values, a decomposition of household net worth. The selected key components of wealth, aligning with the findings from the work of Herring and Henderson (2016) are shown in Table A.5 in appendix A. Multiple regression analysis is performed to identify which wealth elements show significant correlation and explanation (coefficient of determination) of the variation in enrollment (school choice). In this test, size effects were determined to identify the dominant variables impacting the dependent variable, the African American HBCU school choice as represented by school enrollment numbers. This is shown in Eq. (02) below. � = 0 + 1 ∗ � −11 + ⋯+ ∗ � −1 ∀ ∈ (1,10) … Eq. 2 Where i is year i, β n is the relative size effect of each wealth element, X i at year I and n is the number of wealth elements selected. The elements with the dominant size effects are considered as the main drivers of the wealth effects on enrollment. Further analysis of the main elements informs understanding the wealth accumulation patterns that focus African American students’ wealth perception. This leads to understanding which wealth accumulation trend drives African American students’ enrollment and thus, college school choice.