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Title: Does Elimination of Affirmative Action Affect Postsecondary Admission and Earnings? Evidence from California
Citation Type: Miscellaneous
Publication Year: 2013
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Abstract: This paper evaluates the impact of eliminating affirmative action in California in postsecondary admission during 1995. Using methodology of difference-indifferences , I compare the university enrollment of minority in California with other states that did not eliminate affirmative action in 1990s. In contrast with the expectation, eliminating affirmative action does not reduce the enrollment of minority students. Research on outcomes by school types does not provide a clear support that fewer minorities enrolled in public schools. Result in labor market also fails to find evidence proving that minority are worse off in earnings after eliminating affirmative action. 2 In 1960, the term "affirmative action" firstly existed in a series orders in response to Civil Rights movement. Affirmative action (AA thereafter) is intended to promote the opportunity of minority group and compensate past discrimination by erase differences between races. In education and labor markets, race is broadly taken into account when the decision of admission, employment or payment is made. One extreme case is quota that sets a particular enrollment (or employment) number for each race. But quota is illegal in United States. There are two main area of adoption of AA-education and labor market. In this paper, I focus on the effect of AA on higher education, especially on school enrollment of minorities. In labor market, most people agree that employers have prejudice and discrimination on minorities. But in education, equity across races is always an important mission. Some even argue that affirmative action overprotects minorities so that produces environment of reverse discrimination. In 1990s, California firstly eliminated affirmative action in higher education admission. Some believe minorities were harmed by the change of law. Some support the policy and think it brings more fairness and better match for students. Nevertheless, most arguments concentrate on administrative data from specific schools. Some other research regards behaviors change in college selection. The purpose of my study is to explore the change of the well-beings of minorities after AA was ended. In this paper, I generalize the argument to the entire states and broaden the topic to two more general outcomes-college enrollment and earnings. By a study of the impact of eliminating AA on a macro-level to see what the effect on postsecondary school enrollment and future earnings of minorities, I conclude that negative effect of elimination of AA is not so serious as people worried. Conducting the methodology of "difference-in-differences", I compare the enrollment of blacks and Hispanics before and after the law was enacted, and detect 3 the difference between the earnings of the minorities who are and not affected by the policy change. The rest of paper is recognized as follows. Section I introduces background information and Section II reviews previous literature. Section III describes data sources and potential limitations. In section IV, I present the empirical strategy of my research and the result with sensitivity test. Labor market outcomes are provided in Section V. Section VI discusses and concludes.
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Authors: Lin, Yuxin
Publisher: Teachers College
Data Collections: IPUMS CPS
Topics: Education
Countries: United States