Affirmative Action in Education

This paper came out a month ago, and I’ve been sitting on it ever since, mainly from sheer lack of time to do it any justice. The subject’s a sensitive one in Malaysia, and even though the research was conducted in India, the situations are similar enough  to have quite a bit of bearing on our own management of education for the disadvantaged.

Just keep in mind that this is still a working paper and conclusions sometimes change rather drastically between the working paper stage and final publishing, as well as the fact that the paper is only looking at one institution in another country.

From the abstract:

Affirmative Action in Higher Education in India: Targeting, Catch Up, and Mismatch at IIT-Delhi
Verónica C. Frisancho Robles, Kala Krishna

Affirmative action policies in higher education are used in many countries to try to socially advance historically disadvantaged minorities. Although the underlying social objectives of these policies are rarely criticized, there is intense debate over the actual impact of such preferences in higher education on educational performance and labor outcomes. Most of the work uses U.S. data where clean performance indicators are hard to find. Using a remarkably detailed dataset on the 2008 graduating class from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Delhi we evaluate the impact of affirmative action policies in higher education on minority students focusing on three central issues in the current debate: targeting, catch up, and mismatch. In addition, we present preliminary evidence on labor market discrimination. We find that admission preferences effectively target minority students who are poorer than the average displaced non-minority student. Moreover, by analyzing the college performance of minority and non-minority students as they progress through college, we find that scheduled caste and scheduled tribe students, especially those in more selective majors, fall behind their same-major peers which is the opposite of catching up. We also identify evidence in favor of the mismatch hypothesis: once we control for selection into majors, minority students who enroll in more selective majors as a consequence of admission preferences end up earning less than their same-caste counterparts in less selective majors. Finally, although there is no evidence of discrimination against minority students in terms of wages, we find that scheduled caste and scheduled tribe students are more likely to get worse jobs, even after controlling for selection.

So, what does all that gobbledegook mean? First the context: India as you may know has been bedevilled by a caste system where certain tribes or castes have been historically discriminated against in many areas of society. One avenue to combat this has been through the implementation of affirmative action in favour of these minority castes and tribes in education and in social assistance, specifically through mandated admissions quotas.

From this research, the conclusions are:

1. Targeting – in terms of helping the right people, India’s policy appears to be successful in terms of assisting the poor to gain access to higher education;
2. Catch Up – However, consistent with intuition, these students tend to do worse than their (unassisted) peers; and
3. Mismatch – The assisted students also tend to end up in courses they would not have chosen for themselves, which exacerbates problem No 2 – if you’re not interested in what you’re studying, you’ll tend to do worse than your potential abilities would indicate. Very obviously, this ends up as lower lifetime wages.

So on the one hand, affirmative action does provide easier access to higher education, which is one precondition for social and economic mobility i.e. making society more “fair”. Education is the great leveller, and while it won’t do anything against wealth inequality, there’s at least some hopes of reducing income inequality embedded in unequal access to education.

But…expectations shouldn’t be too high and the mechanism of assistance matters. If assisted students are forced into subjects they have no aptitude for, you’ll get sub-optimal results both in terms of grades and in terms of the final hoped-for outcome of equal opportunity ≡ equal economic and social mobility.

It’s not a complete waste of time and money – relative to the alternative of no assistance/quotas at all, the students are still miles better off. But the overall impact is likely be less than desired, and over time reduces the overall quality of the workforce relative to what’s possible. In the end, that might be a price worth paying – but that’s a social and political decision, not an economic one.

Are there any solutions to the mismatch and catch up problems? Not that I know of. Now…would it be too much to hope for that someone does similar research here? Preferably without any political rhetoric?

Technical notes

Frisancho Robles, Verónica C. & Kala Krishna, "Affirmative Action in Higher Education in India: Targeting, Catch Up, and Mismatch at IIT-Delhi", NBER Working Paper No. 17727, January 2012