An Economic Analysis of Color-Blind Affirmative Action

This article offers an economic analysis of color-blind alternatives to conven-tional affirmative action policies in higher education, focusing on efficiency issues. When the distribution of applicants ’ traits is fixed (i.e., in the short-run) color blindness leads colleges to shift weight from academic traits that pre-dict performance to social traits that proxy for race. Using data onmatriculates at several selective colleges and universities, we estimate that the short-run effi-ciency cost of ‘‘blind’ ’ relative to ‘‘sighted’ ’ affirmative action is comparable to the cost colleges would incur were they to ignore standardized test scores when deciding on admissions. We then build a model of applicant competition with endogenous effort in order to study long-run incentive effects. We show that, compared to the sighted alternative, color-blind affirmative action is inefficient because it flattens the function mapping effort into a probability of admission in the model’s equilibrium. ‘‘Implementing race-neutral programs will help educational institutions minimize litigation risks they currently face.... If we are persistent in implementing race-neutral approaches, the end result will be to fulfill the great words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who dreamed of the day tha