Black students who are taught by teachers who attended an Historically Black College or University or HBCU fare better than their peers. That’s what Lavar Edmonds found as he dug into a trove of data from North Carolina schools. More intriguing still: while students with Black teachers show the biggest gains, the effect also held with white teachers who graduated from HBCUs. Edmonds, the runner up in the Have You Heard Graduate Student Research Contest, explains what he thinks is the “secret sauce” at HBCUs, and why his findings challenge some of the central assumptions of so-called “role-model effects” in education.

If you know anything about higher education in prison, it's that these programs "pay off" for taxpayers in the form of tax savings and lower rates of recidivism. But the economic justification for college behind bars misses a far more profound value, says Patrick Conway, winner of the 2021 Have You Heard Graduate Student Research Contest. Conway's research raises essential and relevant questions - about who is entitled to be educated at tax-payer expense, what kind of education they should receive, and how we view crime.