\n<\/p>\n
A<\/span>ttending a historically Black college or university (HBCU) as a young adult may be linked with better later-life cognitive outcomes for Black Americans, according to a recent study. The authors sampled 1,978 Black American adults who attended college between 1940 and 1980 (35% attended an HBCU), and who attended a high school in a state with an HBCU. The conclusion? There may be a correlation between collegiate environment and long-term wellness.<\/p>\n During that time frame of attendance, two major policy implementations shaped schooling in the country: first, in 1952, Brown v Board of Education ruled that racial segregation in schools was unconstitutional; and second was the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which barred racial discrimination in school.<\/p>\n Dr Marilyn Thomas, an assistant professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, was interested in whether or not the cohort would show different outcomes between HBCU graduates and graduates of predominantly white institutions (PWIs). The study mined differences between Black students who attended college during a time when they were largely prevented from attending white colleges and Black students who attended college after segregation was outlawed.<\/p>\n The study, published last month in Jama Network Open with co-authors from Rutgers University, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Columbia University, Boston University and Harvard University, found that differences in when or how participants were exposed to \u201cstate-sanctioned racialized education policies\u201d had an impact on later life.<\/p>\n \u201cHBCU attendees had better cognition across all three of those different time periods,\u201d Thomas said. At age 62, Black adults who had attended an HBCU had better memory and cognitive function than those who attended a predominantly white institution (PWI).<\/p>\n Study participants who attended HBCUs also tended to have different early life experiences, leading to some \u201cpretty striking\u201d characteristics, Thomas said, including receiving encouragement to attend school.<\/p>\n \u201cParticipants who attended HBCUs were more likely, for example, to have mothers or female caregivers that had a college education,\u201d she said. \u201cThey were also more likely to have reported being shown affection when they were growing up, love and affection.\u201d<\/p>\n Thomas has been interested in studying the impacts of an HBCU experience since the early part of her career. Her dissertation looked at the association between structural racism and various outcomes. For the last several years, she has looked at various forms of racial experiences or exposures to racism and a variety of health outcomes that are correlated with the stress regulation system, like hypertension, allostatic load, which is the cumulative measure of stress on the body, telomere lengths, which are associated with ageing and age-related diseases, and accelerated aging.<\/p>\n \u201cIt didn\u2019t matter what form of racism I was looking at, whether it was everyday racism or country-level anti-Black bias \u2013 the beginning of my work showed that exposure to racism was associated with worse health,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Higher educational attainment is associated with an ability to mitigate some of the impacts of exposure to racism \u2013 keeping the amount of exposure to chronic racism the same, those with higher education had better health outcomes than those with lower levels of education. Thomas decided to look at that association and shifted her scholarship towards \u201cfinding sources of resilience against the negative or adverse effects of racism on later life health for Black adults\u201d.<\/p>\n The study was \u201cexploratory\u201d, Thomas said, and one of the first of its kind \u2013 most studies have looked at the effect of years at schooling on cognition, while this one specifically looked at the environment of the school.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a growing body of evidence demonstrating that those years of schooling differently impact people by race,\u201d Thomas said. Instead of measuring only the number of years of collegiate attendance, this study measured whether or not any attendance at an HBCU was impactful.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are people in the sample that could have attended an HBCU the first year of college and then switched to a PWI,\u201d Thomas said. \u201cOur question was, \u2018Is any exposure to an HBCU going to have a later life impact on your cognition?\u2019 And the answer was yes.\u201d<\/p>\n As an exploratory study, it didn\u2019t look at certain nuances like, for instance, someone who attended a predominantly white institution for undergraduate school, but then attended an HBCU for graduate school. Thomas believes additional analysis can unpack the difference for people with distinct trajectories.<\/p>\n Thomas said the study was \u201ca first step\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat\u2019s really important about this finding is that it suggests that, yes, culturally affirming spaces actually can help promote and protect cognitive health,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s even more than that because it doesn\u2019t just demonstrate that it\u2019s protective against cognitive health, but the benefits to this exposure last well beyond graduation \u2013 these are people at mean age 62. These benefits are long lasting.\u201d<\/p>\n For non-scientists and non-academics, studies can sometimes be opaque. Thomas hopes that even people who are not in the research world glean from the study the importance of preserving and supporting spaces like HBCUs.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s an attack right now on DEI programs, promoting diversity, bringing people in from different backgrounds and different ideologies \u2013 all that is under scrutiny right now,\u201d she said. \u201cBut what this [study] does is it shows us actually when you do create environments where socially marginalized people feel more welcome or feel more affirmed, they live healthier lives.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Attending a historically Black college or university (HBCU) as a young adult may be linked with better later-life cognitive outcomes for Black Americans, according to a recent study. The authors sampled 1,978 Black American adults who attended college between 1940 and 1980 (35% attended an HBCU), and who attended a high school in a state<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":47378,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[706,14155,37,150,678],"class_list":{"0":"post-47377","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-black","9":"tag-hbcu","10":"tag-health","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-students"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47377","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=47377"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47377\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/47378"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}