Affirmative Action and Racial Segregation

Peter Hinrichs

No 1636, Working Papers (Old Series) from Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland

Abstract: A number of states have recently prohibited the use of affirmative action in admissions to public universities statewide. A growing body of research suggests that these affirmative action bans reduce minority enrollment at selective colleges while leaving overall minority college enrollment rates unchanged. The effect of these bans on racial segregation across colleges has not yet been estimated directly and is theoretically ambiguous due to a U-shaped relationship between minority enrollment and college selectivity. This paper uses variation in the timing of affirmative action bans across states to estimate their effects on racial segregation, as measured by exposure and dissimilarity indexes. The results suggest that affirmative action bans have in some cases increased segregation across colleges but in others cases may have actually reduced it. In particular, early affirmative action bans in states with highly selective public universities appear to be associated with more segregation, whereas other affirmative action bans appear to be associated with less segregation.

Keywords: affirmative action; college admissions; higher education; segregation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I24 I28 J15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 37 pages
Date: 2016-12-23
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.26509/frbc-wp-201636r Revised Version 16-36R - Full Text (text/html)

Related works:
Journal Article: Affirmative Action and Racial Segregation (2020)
Working Paper: Affirmative Action and Racial Segregation (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fip:fedcwp:1636

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers (Old Series) from Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by 4D Library ().