The effect of banning affirmative action on human capital accumulation prior to college entry

Kate Antonovics,Ben Backes

doi:10.1186/2193-8997-3-5

Abstract

Abstract This paper examines how banning affirmative action in university admissions affects both overall academic achievement and the racial gap in academic achievement prior to college entry. Focusing on college-bound high school students, we use a difference-in-difference methodology to analyze the impact of the end of race-based affirmative action at the University of California in 1998 on both the overall level of SAT scores and high school GPA, and the racial gap in SAT scores and high school GPA. We find little evidence of either a decline in academic achievement or a widening of the racial gap in academic achievement after the ban. JEL codes I21; I24

Highlights

Universities in the United States are increasingly limited in their ability to practice racebased affirmative action
Panels (a) and (b) show normalized SAT math and verbal scores for Californians and the rest of the U.S whites tend to score higher than underrepresented minorities (URMs), the gap appears to be roughly stable over time
While the direction of these point estimates indicates an overall increase in academic achievement in California relative to the rest of the country, we note that the magnitudes are small and, on balance, suggest that Prop 209 had no meaningful impact on the overall level of academic achievement

Summary

Introduction

Universities in the United States are increasingly limited in their ability to practice racebased affirmative action. We estimate β0C1a2lifornia and β0j 12 for each of the states in our data to measure whether the change in the minority-white gap in California was extreme relative to the change in states that did not ban affirmative action in the same time period.

Results

Conclusion