Considering race in graduate admissions

About this book

Graduate education is a key pathway to important areas of influence in our nation and the training ground for acquiring the specialized knowledge critical to individual, national, and global economic success. Yet, students of color remain severely underrepresented in graduate studies. Moreover, statewide affirmative action bans in six states threaten the ability of postsecondary institutions to address this underrepresentation by prohibiting race-conscious admissions policies. Prior studies have documented reductions in student of color enrollment at undergraduate institutions after bans on affirmative action, with similar effects at schools of law and medicine, but there is no research on how such bans have influenced enrollment in graduate programs. In this study, with a methodology that supports causal inference, I use data from the CGS/GRE Survey of Graduate Enrollment and Degrees to examine whether bans on affirmative action across four states Texas, California, Washington and Florida--have reduced the enrollment of underrepresented students of color in a cross-section of graduate fields: natural sciences, engineering, social sciences, business, education, and humanities. I find that the bans have reduced the average proportion of graduate students who are students of color by about 12.2 percent across all six fields of study. Within specific fields of study, affirmative action bans have led to about a 26-percent statistically significant reduction in the mean proportion of all graduate students enrolled in engineering who are students of color; a 19-percent decline in the natural sciences; a 15.7-percent drop in the social sciences, and a 11.8-percent drop in the humanities. I also find about a 13-percent decline in student of color representation in the education field, though the effect is only marginally statistically significant. There appears to be no impact in the field of business.