The Economic Impact of a Historically Black College Upon its Local Community

Abstract

Twenty years have passed since South Carolina State College (SCSC) and Orangeburg, South Carolina, received national attention as a result of the deaths of two SCSC students and a local high school student in a civil rights demonstration on campus. In that period, numerous social and political changes have occurred while other needed changes remain to be addressed by a society still experiencing desegregation. South Carolina State College, as the sole senior college serving this region of South Carolina, has initiated several efforts to better define the relationship between itself and the communities within its immediate geographic area. One of these, an economic impact study, is described here. The American Council on Education (ACE) saw the need for college/community economic impact studies when it commissioned a research team to specify a methodology for the implementation of such studies. Caffrey and Isaacs offered recommended research methods in an ACE publication that has become a standard in the field, Estimating the Impact of a College or University on a Local Economy. Basically, the methodology recommended was a comprehensive set of simultaneous equations which assess direct economic and fiscal impact. Many recent studies have employed this meth-