Affirmative Action and the Quality-Fit Tradeoff

Peter Arcidiacono and Michael Lovenheim

No 20962, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper reviews the literature on affirmative action in undergraduate education and law schools, focusing in particular on the tradeoff between the quality of an institution and the fit between a school and a student. We first discuss the conditions under which affirmative action for under-represented minorities (URM) could help or harm their educational outcomes. We then provide descriptive evidence on the extent of affirmative action in law schools, as well as a review of the contentious literature on how affirmative action affects URM student performance in law school. We present a simple selection model that we argue provides a useful framework for interpreting the disparate findings in this literature. The paper then turns to a similar discussion of affirmative action in undergraduate admissions, focusing on evidence of the extent of race-based admissions practices and the effect such preferences have on the quality of schools in which minority students enroll, graduation rates, college major and earnings. We pay much attention to the evidence from state-level bans on affirmative action and argue these bans are very informative about how affirmative action affects URM students. Finally, we discuss the evidence on "percent plans," which several states have enacted in an attempt to replace affirmative action.

JEL-codes: I23 I24 I26 J15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-edu
Note: ED LS PE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published as Peter Arcidiacono & Michael Lovenheim, 2016. "Affirmative Action and the Quality-Fit Trade-Off," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 54(1), pages 3-51, March.

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w20962.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Affirmative Action and the Quality-Fit Trade-Off (2016)
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:nbr:nberwo:20962

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w20962

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by (wpc@nber.org).