The Long-Term Effects of Preventing Affirmative Action in US Higher Education

This paper estimates the long-term impact of affirmative action bans on men and women from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups (URM) in the United States. Using data from the US Census and the American Community Survey, we use a differential framework to compare the college completion, graduation, earnings, and employment of URM to non-URM populations before and after affirmative action bans across several US states. US. We also use case study analysis and other measures to confirm the validity of our approach and discuss the generalizability of the findings. The results suggest that affirmative action bans result in lower URM women’s college graduation, earnings, and employment relative to non-Hispanic White women, which are largely driven by the effects on Hispanic women. Thus, the ban on affirmative action resulted in widening of the racial/ethnic disparity in both college completion and earnings among women. The effects on URM men are less clear and show significant variation across states, with some estimates pointing to a possible positive effect on labor market outcomes for Black men. These results suggest that the relative magnitudes of college quality versus disparity outcomes differ for URM men and women and highlight the importance of disaggregating results by gender, race, and ethnicity. We conclude by discussing how our results compare with others in the literature and directions for future research.

No comparison with the losers in these policies? And shouldn’t the inspiration for these policies be black people? That’s all from a new NBER working paper on



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