Were Minority Students Discouraged From Applying to University of California Campuses After the Affirmative Action Ban?

This paper uses student-level data to investigate how the college application behavior of underrepresented minorities (URMs) changed in response to the 1998 end of affirmative action in admissions at the University of California (UC). We show that all URMs experienced a drop in their probability of admission to at least one UC campus. However, the relative decline in URM SAT scoresending rates – our proxy for application rates – was small and concentrated at Berkeley and UCLA among URMs who experienced the largest relative drop in their predicted probability of admission. In addition, we find some evidence of a shift towards less selective UCs rather than out of the UC system. Overall, our paper highlights the stability of URM application behavior in the face of substantial declines in their admission rates. ∗Email addresses: [email protected], [email protected]. We thank the University of California Office of the President, the College Board, and David Card for assistance in obtaining our data. In addition, we are grateful to Prashant Bharadwaj, Julie Cullen, Gordon Dahl, Karthik Muralidharan, Joel Sobel, UC San Diego seminar participants, two anonymous referees, and especially Richard Sander for helpful comments and discussion.