Efficacy vs. Equity: What Happens When States Tinker with College Admissions in a Race-Blind Era?

Sandra Black, Kalena E. Cortes and Jane Arnold Lincove

No 20804, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: College admissions officers face a rapidly changing policy environment where court decisions have limited the use of affirmative action. At the same time, there is mounting evidence that commonly used signals of college readiness, such as the SAT/ACTs, are subject to race and socioeconomic bias. Our study investigates the efficacy and equity of college admissions criteria by estimating the effect of multiple measures of college readiness on freshman college grade point average and four-year graduation. Importantly, we take advantage of a unique institutional feature of the Texas higher education system to control for selection into admissions and enrollment. We find that SAT/ACT scores, high school exit exams, and advanced coursework are predictors of student success in college. However, when we simulate changes in college enrollment and college outcomes with additional admissions criteria, we find that adding SAT/ACT or high school exit exam criteria to a rank-based admissions policy significantly decreases enrollment among minorities and other groups, with the most negative effects generated by the SAT/ACT, while inducing only minimal gains in college GPA and four-year graduation rates.

JEL-codes: I21 I23 I24 J15 J18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lma
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Published as Efficacy Versus Equity: What Happens When States Tinker With College Admissions in a Race-Blind Era? Sandra E. Black, Kalena E. Cortes, Jane Arnold Lincove Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis Vol 38, Issue 2, pp. 336 - 363 First Published June 1, 2016 https://doi.org/10.3102/0162373716629006

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Working Paper: Efficacy vs. Equity: What Happens When States Tinker with College Admissions in a Race-Blind Era? (2014)
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