ABSTRACT This article explores Belman and Heywood’s sheepskin effect hypothesis using a modified Mincerian wage equation to test the sheepskin effect of returns on education in Colombia. This analysis is based on the 2014 Living Standards Survey from the National Department of Statistics. It includes variables that capture the possession of different levels of qualifications. A test for whether Afro-Colombian women obtain larger returns for signals of high productivity (e.g., a university degree) and lower returns for signals of low productivity (e.g., a secondary school diploma), compared to the non-Afro-Colombian women in the sample, found differential sheepskin effects. Afro-Colombian women in this sample received lower returns for low productivity signals (high school diplomas) than their counterparts do. In contrast, returns on higher levels of education (graduate studies) are higher for Afro-Colombian women than for the other analyzed group. Hence, the results suggest that Afro-Colombian women, as the saying goes, need to work twice as hard to get half as far. They need to rush to achieve higher levels of education, amidst severe hardship, to overcome the existing differences in the returns on education.