The Role of Affirmative Action in Enrollment, Test Scores, and School Quality: Evidence from India
Presented by:
Monica Agarwal
Practice Job Talk
Agricultural and Applied Economics
UW Madison
Thursday, September 28, 2023
3:45 pm-5:15 pm
Taylor-Hibbard Seminar Room (Rm103)
Worldwide, affirmative action policies are implemented as a means to promote social equity. India’s Right to Education Act (RTE), one of the largest affirmative action policies in the world mandate all private schools to reserve 25% of incoming seats at entry-level grades for low socioeconomic status students. Despite being in existence for more than a decade, the effectiveness of this policy remains largely understudied. In this paper, I estimate the causal impact of RTE’s 25% quotas on children’s learning outcomes using a combination of rich administrative and survey data in a large state in India. I leverage the lottery based allocation of oversubscribed schools to identify the causal impact of being a beneficiary under this policy. I find that the policy improves children’s English test scores by .18 SD via beneficiaries attending significantly better schools, and investing more time in educational activities. Furthermore, while the policy allocates children to private schools, there exists a large variation in school quality within the private sector. Motivated by the existence of this within-sector heterogeneity in quality, I uncover the distribution of effects within the private sector, and find that higher quality private schools boost English test scores by .5-.7 SD, relative to their lower quality counterparts. My findings are from a context when all learning is remote, and suggest that private schools, especially the ones at the upper end of the quality distribution, do a better job at adapting to, and implementing remote educational technologies, and in doing so, they also enhance children’s learning.
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