IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/33563.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Academic Consequences of Affirmative Action Bans Combined with Diversity Targets

Author

Listed:
  • Eric Zitzewitz

Abstract

This paper examines the problem of a college affected by both a legal ban on affirmative action in admissions and pressure to raise enrollment of underrepresented minorities (URMs), as exemplified by UCLA, which adopted a holistic admissions process in 2006 in response to protests over low URM enrollment. The new process increased the URM share of admitted students by about 3 percentage points, but the primary effects of the changes were on admissions decisions within racial/ethnic groups. Within all groups, admission rates for applicants with high SAT scores and low income and parental education declined. Measured relative to UCLA’s pre-2006 revealed preferences, achieving the increase in URM admissions via holistic admissions was roughly 4-5 times as costly as doing so via a simple reallocation of slots between groups. Had UCLA complied with a stricter interpretation of the affirmative action ban, it would have been significantly more costly.

Suggested Citation

  • Eric Zitzewitz, 2025. "The Academic Consequences of Affirmative Action Bans Combined with Diversity Targets," NBER Working Papers 33563, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:33563
    Note: ED LE
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w33563.pdf
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • I23 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Higher Education; Research Institutions
    • K39 - Law and Economics - - Other Substantive Areas of Law - - - Other

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:33563. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.