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A college degree can be a helpful investment in a student’s career prospects, but choosing a college can feel overwhelming. Many Black students seek the inclusive environment of a Historically Black College or University (HBCU). While some HBCUs lead to high payoffs for graduates, financially-focused Black students can also find education elsewhere that has the potential of leading to high salaries and stable careers.

In this article, we examine colleges with largely white student populations that are nonetheless likely to lead to strong average payoffs for Black graduates. This topic is important because most Black college students attend predominantly white institutions (). Prospective students may benefit from having relevant earnings data before they apply.

Read on to learn what we discovered about which PWIs offer the highest payoff for Black students.

Return on Investment for Black Students at PWIs

We considered several factors to find the financial payoff for Black students at PWIs. First, we identified PWIs (50% of the student body identify as white) that also had at least 25% of the student body identify as Black. This increases the odds that Black students at these schools are earning at or near the median annual salary for all graduates.

We then looked at two metrics for each of these PWIs:

Analyzing the data in this way allows us to control for the school's location and the racial inequities in local labor markets that negatively affect salaries for Black college graduates.

The table below is ranked by financial payoff, or the difference between a particular school’s median salary among graduates and its state’s salary threshold for Black employees.

2024 PWIs With the Highest Payoff for Black Students

A Deeper Dive Into the Top Schools

 

Chamberlain University - Ohio (CUO) is the Columbus branch of the Chamberlain University system, a for-profit school with a big online presence and campuses in 15 states. CUO programs focus on nursing and other healthcare professions. About one-third of the school’s enrollees identify as Black, and nearly 90% are women. 

CUO’s yearly median salary is twice the salary threshold for Black workers in Ohio. Nearly all the university’s graduates enter the healthcare field in some capacity, so it’s possible that Ohio’s healthcare employees earn especially well compared to other lines of work in the state.

Indiana Wesleyan University - National & Global (IWUNG) is the division of IWU that markets primarily to adult learners with some experience in the workplace. All of the school’s undergraduate offerings are online. The most popular programs include bachelor’s degrees in nursing and business.

IWUNG graduates earn median pay that’s $18,441 over Indiana’s salary threshold for Black employees. This is respectable but a much less dramatic payoff than the previous school, Chamberlain University - Ohio. As private schools, both of these universities have relatively high upfront costs compared to public schools hosting in-state residents.

The Catholic Neumann University has a small undergraduate population of about 1,700 students, 29% of whom identify as Black. The school’s most popular bachelor’s program is also the second highest paying for alumni: Nursing graduates earn higher salaries than graduates of any other program except the homeland security bachelor’s degree.

As another private university, Neumann is relatively pricey compared to the median cost of U.S. colleges. But on the whole, graduates earn nearly $13,000 more than Pennsylvania’s salary threshold for Black workers.

The University of Southern Mississippi (USM) is the first public school on our list. It costs Mississippi residents much less to attend than some of the private colleges, but graduates still earn a respectable amount more than the salary threshold for Black workers in the state. Mississippi also has one of the lowest cost of living scores in the U.S., so the $10,481 payoff stretches further here than other areas.

USM alumni from the architectural engineering technologies program earn the highest pay, followed by nursing graduates.

This private Maryland school, Stevenston University, offers both on-campus and online bachelor’s and master’s degree programs. The school’s nursing program produces the highest earning alumni, with accounting and computer systems networking following close behind.

Stevenson graduates tend to earn more than $9,000 above the salary threshold for Black workers in Maryland. Nearly all new students receive some amount of institutional financial aid to help supplement funding from government sources.

The Cleveland-based Notre Dame College (NDC) is much smaller than the better known University of Notre Dame but is more racially and socioeconomically diverse. In fact, at NDC, more than one-third of students hail from underrepresented backgrounds and more than half receive needs-based federal Pell Grants. 

NDC is relatively affordable for a private school, with a yearly tuition about $2,000 below the median cost for four-year colleges. Nursing and business students at NDC earn the highest median salaries after graduation. 

William Carey University (WCU) is another private school with solid earnings payoffs for graduates who live in Mississippi. Interestingly, its average annual costs are $3,000 less than the public USM. This might be because WCU awards a lot of financial aid to undergraduate students.

The university’s nursing and biology graduates are also the highest and third-highest earners in the workplace, respectively. Education majors hold the #2 spot.

With more than 22,000 undergraduate enrollees, the second public school on this list is also the largest. At Georgia Southern University (GSU), about 41% of students identify with a historically underrepresented background, which is fairly unusual for a public university that’s not in a major metropolitan area. 

STEM and business majors at GSU lead to the biggest payoffs: Three of the five highest earning programs relate to engineering and one is in management information systems. Business is also the most popular major at GSU.

The next public school on this list is the University of South Carolina - Upstate (USCU) in Spartanburg. One-third of students identify as Black while another 16% claim Asian, Hispanic or Latino, or multiracial descent, making it a truly diverse public university. 

Engineering, nursing, and information science graduates tend to earn the highest salaries at USCU. Also, since South Carolina is right in the middle of U.S. states in terms of living costs, the $9,000 payoff over the salary threshold for Black employees stretches further than in more expensive states.

Ohio Dominican University (ODU) is a small Catholic university that resides in Ohio’s capital of Columbus. In terms of Ohio schools on this list, ODU has a wider variety of degree choices than the healthcare-focused Chamberlain University - Ohio. However, ODU is usually more expensive to attend than NDC and has a slightly lower median financial payoff.

The university’s highest paying field of study is biology by a long way. Accounting and business administration are next in line, with business and education proving the most popular.

Winthrop University features a slightly higher graduation rate and slightly lower cost than the median for four-year colleges. One-third of its students identify as Black and nearly half hail from an underrepresented racial background. 

The largest undergraduate programs are in business and biology. However, the highest earners graduate from Winthrop’s programs in chemistry as well as design and applied arts.

Graduates from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock (UALR) tend to earn less than the median salary for U.S. college graduates, but their pay after 10 years is still nearly $8,000 above the salary threshold for Black workers in Arkansas. Earnings also stretch farther in the state than many places — more than 40 states have higher costs of living than Arkansas. 

Many bachelor’s degree students study nursing and criminal justice at UALR. Nursing graduates also command the highest wages, followed by alumni in construction engineering technologies and systems engineering.

Delta State University is another public school in a small town setting. More than one-third of students identify as Black. As with other Mississippi colleges, the relatively low median salaries don’t account for the state’s low cost of living. 

The most popular bachelor’s degree programs are in teacher education and registered nursing. This university has a low graduation rate of 45% after eight years, which could indicate a broad lack of institutional support for student success. 

What About Small PWIs?

For the results above, we limited our search to colleges that had at least 1,000 undergraduate students to make sure the findings were statistically significant. But there are two small PWIs worth mentioning that meet our demographic criteria:

• Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center (LSUHSC) in Shreveport boasts the largest financial payoff for Black alumni of any school we looked at: $57,656 above the state’s salary threshold for Black employees.
• Chamberlain University in Indiana (CUI) also has a high payoff of $46,842 over Indiana’s threshold. 

Black students looking for a small-college experience might consider these schools. However, they should understand that this data is suspect because of the small number of undergraduate students enrolled at each (currently 42 for LSUHSC and 390 for CUI). That said, it’s possible that the small number of undergraduate students at these schools increases the likelihood that individual Black graduates earn at or near the median salary for each.

Bottom Line

There are many PWIs with sizable Black student populations that may lead to beneficial financial payoffs for graduates. The schools listed here produce alumni who earn median salaries well above the norm for Black workers in their areas, so these might be worth considering for Black applicants who want financial stability in the future.

Methodology

We gathered data from the (EVE), which packages information from publicly available government sources to assess the economic value of degree programs. We only considered schools in the Predominantly White Institutions category (50% white student enrollment) that also had a significant percentage of Black students (25% or higher). 

On the EVE dashboard, we found the overall median salaries of alumni 10 years after graduation for each institution. We compared these salaries to the state’s Black Threshold 1  — the median earnings for Black graduates in the same state with the same level of education — to find the financial payoff.