The Impact of Legal Challenges to Affirmative Action on Educational Choice.

Abstract

The first chapter of the dissertation explores the impact of the United State's Supreme Court's 2003 decisions in Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger on applications and admissions at an elite public university. The decisions proscribed the use of point systems; however, they permitted the use of race in a holistic review. I and that the size of the applicant pool declined and that the academic quality of applicants and admits increased. I find no evidence that the conditional probability of admissions declined for black applicants or that the advantage that white applicants with relatively low selection index scores held over Asian applicants with similar scores declined. The second chapter examines the impacts of both Texas's Top Ten Percent Rule (TTTPR) and targeted recruitment programs on the score report sending behavior of SAT test-takers in Texas. Texas's Top Ten Percent Rule guarantees admission to any public college in Texas to high school graduates who finish in the top decile. Using SAT data and Texas High School data, I examine the score report sending behavior of SAT takers by self-reported class rank. I find that TTTPR affects score report sending behavior and that the effects vary with self-reported rank. I find that the targeted financial aid program instituted by the University of Texas was successful in attracting score reports, a proxy for applications, from targeted high schools; the program instituted by Texas A&M-College Station was not as successful. The third chapter examines the effects of the implementation of Texas's Top Ten Percent Rule on the rate at which graduates from Texas's high school attempt an admissions examination, a proxy for applying to a more selective college. Using high school level data from the Academic Excellence Indicator System, I find a decrease in the percentage of graduates who attempt an admissions examination and that the decrease is larger at schools that had student bodies with socioeconomically disadvantaged students or high schools with student bodies that had a high percentage of Hispanic Students.