Does Banning A¢rmative Action Harm College Student Quality?

Banning a¢rmative action from college admissions decisions cannot prevent an admissions o¢ce that cares about diversity from achieving it through channels other than the explicit consideration of race. We construct a model of college admissions where candidates from two groups with di¤erent average quali...cations compete for a ...xed number of seats. When an admissions o¢ce that cares both about the quality and diversity of its entering class can use group identity as a criterion for admissions, its preferred admissions rule selects the best-quali...ed candidates from each group. When it cannot use a¢rmative action, the admissions o¢ce’s preferred rule generally does not select the best-quali...ed candidates from either group: it randomizes over candidates to achieve diversity, at the expense of within-group selection. A ban always reduces diversity, and may also lower average quality. Moreover, even when a total ban on a¢rmative action raises average quality, a partial ban may raise average quality even more. Acknowledgments We thank Bob Anderson, Kim-Sau Chung, Bill Dickens, Aaron Edlin, Joe Harrington, Lorraine Mitchell, Tarun Sabarwal, Ilya Segal, Chris Shannon, and seminar participants at Berkeley, Johns Hopkins, the Southeast Economic Theory Conference, and SITA 1999 for helpful comments. We are especially grateful to Matthew Rabin for his many helpful suggestions and untiring encouragement.