Impacts of Banning Affirmative Action in US Higher Education

 This paper estimates the long-run impacts of banning affirmative action on men and women from under-represented minority (URM) racial and ethnic groups in the United States. Using data from the US Census and American Community Survey, the authors compare the college degree completion, graduate degree completion, earnings, and employment of URM individuals to non-URM individuals before and after affirmative action bans went into effect across several US states. 

Results suggest that banning affirmative action results in a decline in URM women’s college degree completion, earnings, and employment relative to non-Hispanic White women, driven largely by impacts on Hispanic women. Thus, affirmative action bans resulted in an increase in racial/ethnic disparities in both college degree completion and earnings among women. 

Effects on URM men are more ambiguous and indicate significant heterogeneity across states, with some estimates pointing to a possible positive impact on labor market outcomes of Black men. These results suggest that the relative magnitude of college quality versus mismatch effects vary for URM men and women and highlight the importance of disaggregating results by gender, race, and ethnicity.