Equitable Growth in Conversation is a recurring series where we talk with economists and other academics to help us better understand whether and how economic inequality affects economic growth and stability. In this installment, Sanjay Supan, project manager of academic research at Equitable Growth, speaks to Omari Swinton, professor of economics at Howard University. Swinton’s research focuses on labor economics and education, including the teenage labor market, the benefits of attending historically Black colleges and universities, the challenges of attaining faculty diversity in higher education, and the returns on a college education. Swinton also is the director of the American Economics Association’s summer training program and scholarship program, in which Equitable Growth participates. In their conversation, Supan and Swinton discuss:

Supan: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today. I really appreciate the chance to hear about your work, Omari.

Swinton: Thank you for inviting me.

Supan: So, let’s dive right into your research. How did you come to center your research on higher education and racial disparities? What core questions shaped your approach?

Swinton: When I was in graduate school, I worked on a project that looked at college graduation rates. My dissertation was on policies to improve the graduation rates at a school that had extremely low graduation rates. What interested me is that graduation rates haven’t really gone up much, even though college attendance has. And if college attendance is supposed to be the major way that people get a step up in their earnings, and we haven’t improved outcomes, then I thought, well, let me see what these kinds of outcomes look like.

That’s where my research started, looking at HBCUs in particular to see if they are doing a better job of graduating similar students than other institutions of higher education. So, that’s the framework that kind of started all my research. And I look at it as the returns on education: If education is supposed to be the great equalizer, and people have as much access to education as they’ve ever had, and we’re not seeing it equalizing, then what is really going on?

Supan: I’d really like to delve into how your research has explored these disparities more specifically. In a recent paper you co-authored about the challenges that high-income Black earners face when trying to build wealth, what stood out to you? How could those insights reshape the way that policymakers think about addressing wealth gaps at the high-income level, compared to lower incomes?

Swinton: That paper had quantitative and qualitative results. We surveyed high-earning Black workers. And what stood out is how people get information about how to make their investment decisions. We still found, among these high-earning Black Americans, the same lack of access to advanced investing techniques that other investors use.

Trust is a really big thing, and there is a lack of trust among high-earning African Americans and the people who advise them on what to do with their money. One of the things that I think is the most interesting finding is that it is troubling to have someone who has money and yet is not able to trust the institutions that exist in our society that other people use to grow their wealth. But it is kind of based in the history of the United States, where banks and other financial institutions have oftentimes treated Black customers worse than non-Black customers.

Finding a way to get past this idea of trust is something that this research was focused on. We sought to identify the barriers to these high-income earners’ access to these markets, and whether there are ways that you can get them to make the sort of investments that lead to greater growth in the future?

Outside of that research, you also see this kind of situation play out among African Americans at all income levels, with the high percent of Black Americans who are unbanked, who don’t have traditional banks, and that still goes back to the idea of trust. A lot of times these near-bank products that these individuals turn to are more costly and don’t have the same protections that a person would have at a bank. And it’s the trust in institutions that seem to be playing a greater role in these outcomes.

Supan: In your view, what are the most pressing unanswered research questions about racial economic mobility? Are there methodological data or other gaps that limit what we can see in wealth and income dynamics for Black U.S. households?

Swinton: There are a lot of gaps in data because oftentimes survey data is the best data, and a lot of the time Black Americans aren’t surveyed in large enough numbers to actually be able to answer questions. [Harvard University economist] Raj Chetty has the best datasets because he has income data from the IRS, and that is kind of the only way to get at a lot of the questions that we would want the answer, seeing as much information and seeing the disparities that exist.

I think one of the methodological issues in this field is how do you interpret these gaps? Do these gaps occur because Black Americans make worse decisions and the outcomes are worse? Or are there things that you cannot see in the data, such as structural obstacles that exist in society that are reinforcing these gaps? Because the income disparity gaps have not been closing. They are actually getting worse by some measures. Why is that the case? If the outright discrimination or the overt discrimination that used to exist could explain why these gaps started in the first place, then why are these gaps still evident? Are there other things that exist that we cannot capture that are leading to them to continue to exist?

So, for example, consider outcomes in education. Why is it that communities that have larger percentages of Black residents often also have worse schools? Why is it that those communities often have fewer banks? And is access to banks going to be able to change the outcome?

I often think of these racial things in another term that I think doesn’t get as much attention in the United States, the rural and urban divide. If you think about how U.S. society is designed, if you don’t live in urban areas, then you don’t have as much access to things, and these rural communities are often left behind. And if you think about the poorest states in America, they tend to be mainly rural. But they tend to also have a higher percent of Black residents. I think a lot of the research doesn’t really focus on those kinds of outcomes. And I think that the methodology could be done better.

Supan: Pulling on that thread a little bit more, either specifically about educational investment in Black communities, place-based investments, or any of the other questions that you outlined just now, has there been any exciting or surprising research that has produced any particularly insightful findings in those areas?

Swinton: I think a lot of what happens with research, at least within the policy space, is everything is divided—one political party is worse for one group for whatever reason. And oftentimes, that doesn’t necessarily match the outcomes that you see for those groups.

So, for instance, one of the things that I find surprising is that during President [Donald] Trump’s first term, a lot of the research, if you compare the outcomes for Black Americans under Presidents Trump and Barack Obama, finds that certain groups of Black Americans, especially Black women, actually had a lot better economic outcomes under President Trump or had worse outcomes under President Obama.

Some of the more surprising results that don’t get enough attention are especially in higher education. We think about what happened in President Trump’s first term for HBCUs, and he actually had better funding for HBCUs than President Obama did. I don’t know if that means anything in terms of general outcomes, but it is an interesting fact. Often, when you look at political leanings, you wouldn’t have thought that would be the outcome, and that’s why it is kind of surprising.

Supan: How should economists grapple with some of those dynamics you mentioned related to Black women’s wealth outcomes and HBCU investments? Are there research questions that should be built upon there?

Swinton: These disparities are hard to pin down. A good example of the problem is if you examine graduation rates at HBCUs. If you use government scorecards as a measure, then many HBCUs outcomes do not measure up. But if you dive deeper into the data, then you will see that, when controlling for the preparation levels of the students that attend the institutions, HBCUs are performing better. It is important to understand the realities of what is being examined so that the nuances that exist can be used to understand what policies might actually be best.

Supan: That’s a great segue into our next topic. I’d like to focus on the role of HBCUs in racial economic mobility, specifically thinking about returns on investments in education. Your research has really leaned into this area. What do you think makes the HBCU experience uniquely effective as an engine of economic mobility?

Swinton: Oftentimes, when people talk about HBCUs, they talk about the secret sauce that makes them good at doing what they do. I recently wrote a book called Vital and Valuable: The Relevance of HBCUs to American Life and Education. And what I tried to do with that research is, instead of just saying these things, let’s actually look at the numbers. And really, it’s a quantitative book that goes through the outcomes, the graduation rates, the challenges that HBCUs face—because it’s a unique environment, in that they are a class of colleges that exist because of an act of Congress, and they’re a fixed class.

The other classes, such as minority-serving institutions or Hispanic-serving institutions, change. But HBCUs were founded for a specific mission, and that mission was to educate, for the most part, the newly freed slaves. HBCUs were founded to be an education opportunity for Black Americans when they couldn’t attend other schools. So, that puts them in a unique position today.

It’s different for minority-serving institutions, where a school might become an MSI because the population in that area changes, and most people go to college close to where they live, but it wasn’t necessarily their goal to help that subclass of people.

My research shows that HBCUs, almost across the board for high-earning Black students, lead to higher graduation rates. So, as an institution, as a group of colleges, if you believe in higher education as the tool to give people more opportunities, then having a class of schools that actually do better in graduating people who oftentimes have worse economic outcomes would be an important tool you can use to actually improve economic mobility. And I think it’s important that scholars research these schools and these opportunities because it’s something that is tangible and that you can see. It’s something that is meaningful in the sense that the institutions that are doing this work care about the work, and they care about the students that they are doing work for.

And however they translate it, it leads to all types of students who attend HBCUs having better outcomes, unless they are the highest-achieving students. Oftentimes, the highest-achieving students will be good no matter where they go to school, but if you really want to move the needle, what you have to look at is the marginal students who could or could not go to college.

HBCUs do way better than other institutions at graduating the students who would not be considered great college students. And those are the students that, using most economic predictors, would have the worst outcomes in terms of graduation and earnings. And getting an education would be the way that you would be able to help them the most.

Supan: So, based on your research, what would have the greatest impact on HBCUs’ ability to build on their success?

Swinton: Almost all HBCUs are relatively underfunded. More funding would allow them to build better on their successes. Look at Howard University, which probably has the largest endowment of any of the HBCUs in the United States, but if you compare it to any other suited institution that is a comprehensive university, Howard is relatively poor.

So, in that context of the most well-off HBCU being a relatively poor college, imagine how the schools that are not the most well-off HBCUs are faring. And that’s the issue that HBCUs run into, the funding issues.

You also have states that have historically underfunded HBCUs, at least the public ones. Take the lawsuit in which the Maryland HBCUs got additional funding because of years of underfunding. Look at what happened in the land grant states, where [the Biden administration] sent letters and stated that those institutions were underfunded, against the law.

I think having more funding would lead to HBCUs producing a greater number of students.

Supan: Let’s transition our conversation now to discussing the economics profession in the current policy moment. Specifically, I’d like to start with the AEA summer training program. Over the past 5 years, you have chaired this program, which plays a key role in expanding the pipeline of students into the field of economics. For those who are unfamiliar with the program, can you describe what AEA summer training program students do during the summer, and what aspects of the experience that participants find the most transformative?

Swinton: I am a student of the AEA summer program myself. I participated in 2001, before I went to Duke University for my Ph.D. And then, while I was at Duke, the AEA summer program came there, and I was a teaching assistant and an instructor in the program. So, I’ve been a student, a TA, an instructor, and now am currently the director of the summer program.

The summer program was started by [the late management professor at Northwestern University and former chair of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago] Marcus Alexis 51 years ago to help Black students who did not have the requisite math skills to get Ph.D.s in economics. The program has since evolved and is open to any student who wants to get the exposure to what it would mean to be in a graduate program in economics. Economics graduate programs do not produce many American students, do not produce many Hispanic students, do not produce many Black students. It is one of the educational fields that has one of the largest impacts but does not have great representation.

The program changes host location every 3 to 5 years, so this is our last year hosting the program at Howard. What we do at Howard is we try to expose students to what it means to be a Ph.D. economist outside of academia, and we have partner institutions that host students during the summer as a part of their research experience. The students take four graduate-level classes during the summer, during the 8-week program. It’s a very intensive program.

Oftentimes, at least from my perspective, the best part of being in a summer program is that you get to meet people who are interested in math and economics. Because a lot of people go to schools where their economics courses don’t have any calculus in it, and they don’t meet other people who are interested in doing that higher level of work. We have 40 students on campus this summer who are taking classes, hearing from researchers about their research, doing their own research, meeting people who might be able to help them if they choose to continue a career in economics.

Supan: Is there an innovation that you introduced to the program since becoming the director? Is there anything that you have introduced at Howard that you are most proud of in relation to the AEA summer training program?

Swinton: I think we did three things. The current political environment aside, we lost a lot of partners this upcoming year. So, a lot of what we had been doing, we were not able to do this summer. Most summers, we have been able to place all the students with either a government agency or a think tank. We have some students with Equitable Growth this year, and they get to see what it’s like and what it actually means to do policy research. The thing that we are most proud of is that we were able to build up support from the local Washington, DC community and the federal government to allow students to have these opportunities that they would not be able to have unless they were in Washington.

We also have a mentoring program that is run by The Women’s Institute for Science, Equity, and Race, led by its founder and president Dr. Rhonda Sharpe, that fills in the gap for people who are not yet in a Ph.D. program, for mentorship and guidance as they prepare to apply for graduate school. What used to happen before Howard University hosted the program, when people left the summer program, that was kind of it. But now the students get to opt in to a program that can support them for up to 2 or 3 years. So, our hope is that that program will be able to keep running after this year.

Supan: As you mentioned, the AEA summer training program changes hosts every 3 to 5 years. If you are able to make an announcement, what’s next for the program?

Swinton: I think the announcement will be coming out shortly, but the program is going to stay in Washington, and it is going to American University. We were able to work with them this summer. They hosted our students for their research presentation. I’m excited that, given the political environment, that somebody wants to host the summer program, and that they are willing to try to figure out what it would look like for them.

Supan: Tying everything together about the policy moment, how does uncertainty around federal policy and funding affect programs such as the AEA summer training program and the diversity initiative for tenure in economics?

Swinton: I’ll speak more about the AEA summer program because I am going through those issues right now. We lost sponsors, people who gave money to support the program. We lost partners from federal agencies and private organizations who once worked with us, who chose to no longer work with us. We even have partners who will help us as long as we don’t publicize that they are working with us.

To me, that is one of the things that makes it so hard to understand and know what is going to happen with the program going forward. Currently, we have a $690,000 shortfall because we lost our National Science Foundation funding. And the grant got canceled the day after the students arrived on campus for the program.

So, we are still working through trying to figure out how we are going to pay for all the things this summer. The American Economic Association did give us more money this year, which helped. But I don’t think programs like this are going to be able to exist without federal funding in the future.

I’d also like to talk about a program that is not directly related. Are you familiar with the Rangel Scholars program?

Supan: I’m not, tell me more.

Swinton: The Rangel Scholars program was one of the programs that was canceled by the Trump administration. It was run out of the State Department in partnership with Howard University. It brought students to campus to learn about becoming a foreign service officer and provided scholarships for graduate school and practical experience with internships and mentoring.

So, they didn’t have the program this summer. And if you think about some of these positions that exist in our government, a lot of them, a lot of the people who get into them, get in through these special pathways. They get an internship, or they have this funded experience from the government, and they see that they like it, and that’s how they get into that career.

I do not know what kind of effect the lack of funding for these types of programs will have in the future. I do know it is having an effect, where people are less willing to say they support these types of programs. And that, in and of itself, has a chilling effect on people’s willingness to do this type of work.

Supan: Yeah. That definitely adds up. And programs like the AEA summer training program and diversity initiative for tenure in economics, like you mentioned, rely on that federal and philanthropic support. What is one thing that you think decision-makers should really understand about the value of sustaining and growing these programs?

Swinton: I think the AEA summer program at Howard will have been successful, but it can’t be judged for 4 to 5 years. We have had around 120 students come through the summer program. We currently have at least 12 to 13 in Ph.D. programs in economics. So, maybe in 5 to 10 years, we will have 15 to 20 Ph.D.s that come out of the program. I don’t know how you value that. But I know some of the people who have come through the program, and I know some of the work that they do, and for me, it is valuable.

I’m not a policymaker, so I don’t know how they would think about that. It basically gets down to what our core values as a country are going to be. And if our core values as a country are going to become, “you have to figure it out on your own, and the government’s not going to help you,” if you can’t depend on the government to do it, then we have to figure out a way to make sure the things that we value continue to exist.

Supan: In a lot of ways, I think the funding environment should be able to, at least temporarily, fill that gap and ideally continue to support these programs. Because like you mentioned, I think that mentorship is probably one of the biggest value-adds of these programs.

Swinton: The summer program to me is something that is valuable, and, given the environment, I was not willing to let the program not exist because of the loss of funding. We do have some philanthropic partners who we are talking to now, but I worry that beyond just this program, what would happen is that people who believe in trying to provide opportunities to people who need them will get discouraged from doing that type of work.

If you look at what happened to Harvard University, and if you look at what happened to the University of Virginia’s president, you see that there is clearly a trend of, if you don’t stop the type of work that the administration thinks you should not be doing, then the government is going to punish you. And I think the bigger long-term fear is that people will not be willing to do this kind of work anymore because they are worried about the consequences for themselves.

So, as a person who thinks about this issue a lot because I am in the middle of it, I don’t know what things will look like in 3 to 4 years. It has only been 6 or 7 months of these new policy changes from the government. And I don’t know what any of that will look like long term.

I think the strength of the United States is that people who are successful don’t all take the same path. You have to worry that a lot of these different paths to success are going to be closed by the government. And then, how are we going to get people to be successful? And if we can’t get different types of people to be successful, then what does our country become?

Supan: In a way, it just emphasizes the need to continue to answer those questions about the effects of inequality and hope one day that the evidence is able to inform a future policy moment.

Swinton: And just to follow up on that point. You also have to get people who are willing to ask that question. At a lot of institutions, such as those in the state of Florida or Texas, this type of racial-based research is probably hard to do in those states now, because they don’t allow those types of questions at institutions. So, what happens if that becomes a trend everywhere? How do we try to fix things that are issues if we can’t actually examine them in an honest way without fear of repercussions for the type of research that we do?

Supan: That leads into another question that you might have previewed there, which is why is it that you think the economics profession engages with racial research in the way that it does? What changes do you think economics needs to make in order to better answer those questions?

Swinton: I think the profession as a whole does not value racial research. Because quantifying this idea that there is something in our models that is preventing a certain group from doing something is hard to do. Our models want to say, well, you don’t have the best outcomes because you didn’t do what you should have done. But we have to find a way to explain that difference.

I think a lot of institutions—and this is even before the current political environment—do not value racial-based research because it often points to failures for society as a whole. And they don’t value that research because they think you’re only looking at something that affects 4 percent or 5 percent of the population, so they don’t care about that. What you often hear when you do racial research is that it is not general interest enough. It is only for a small group, and most people don’t care—which is the general problem with the profession overall. Other professions are more open to answering these types of questions and examining them, but economics as a whole is not.

Supan: What are some solutions that researchers and their institutions can lean on to better incentivize engagement on these issues?

Swinton: Publication of more research along these terms in top journals. There could be less concern about where the research is mentioned and more concern about the quality of the research. Other fields do a better job of engaging each other, which allows for wider and deeper discussions of the issues.

Supan: I’d love to end on a positive note. I was wondering if you wanted to give a shout out a particular mentor you have had who has influenced your career?

Swinton: Sure. Dr. Rhonda Sharpe has been my mentor probably for 20-some odd years, and our relationship has changed over the years. But when I wanted to bring the AEA summer program to Howard, the only way I would feel comfortable doing it was with her support.

Rhonda is the president of a think tank, I guess—it might not be a think tank—but she does a lot of the interesting types of research that inform these types of questions. She thinks about disaggregating data. And she has always been the type of person who does not follow a traditional path because she gave up a tenure track job to start her policy institute. I think her support and her example is kind of what keeps me going and doing the kind of work that I still do.

Supan: Well, that seems like a good place to leave it. Thank you so much again for joining me today.

Swinton: Thank you.