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Colleagues are invited to read the following two articles. These were published in the IE of 25-06-08. Articles in original can be accessed by clicking on the link below each. I will post my remarks later.



Social justice and its myths

Mihir Sharma

Posted online: Wednesday, June 25, 2008 at 2055 hrs Who benefits from reservations? And who loses out? A new study has some answers

No politically fraught issue has been debated without hard data for as long as has the question of caste-based quotas in higher education. Very little is known definitively about who actually wins and loses from the policy; even the parameters around which the size of the quotas are based are almost certainly outdated. In this vacuum, anecdotal evidence has combined with political polemic to lead to a generally believed set of principles, which are trotted out with monotonous regularity whenever required.

This is one commonly held belief: students benefiting from reservations are frequently not good enough - or do not have the skills - to actually benefit from the education they will receive. This 'mis-match' is, we are expected to believe, not only a waste for the institutions forced to admit them and to the individuals themselves, but to the economy as a whole. Twelve students, recently expelled from IIT-Delhi, allege that they were told this quite explicitly.

Consider, also, the marvellously evocative phrase 'creamy layer'. While the phrase now has a legal meaning - the children of government employees above a certain rank, or of households earning more than 2.5 lakh a year - its centrality in discussion reflects the degree to which people are convinced that those who benefit from reservation are 'rich' in some sense, and indeed probably better-off than the candidates that they displace. Thus it is implied that deserving candidates are frequently excluded for the dubious social benefit provided by admitting candidates who are already, in economic terms, privileged.

Fortunately, for the first time, these common assumptions - and others like them - can be put to the test. This is thanks to a mammoth project undertaken by a small group of economists: Marianne Bertand of Chicago, Rema Hanna of New York University, and Sendhil Mullainathan of MIT. They spent years gathering information about applicants for admission to engineering colleges from an unnamed Indian state in 1996, focusing on those who just made and those who just missed the admissions cutoff in each caste category - general, SC and OBC. This required them to trawl through lists and actually, physically, trace and interview those applicants and their families - some of whom had moved several times since their last known address was recorded.

What did their analysis of that information, now available online, reveal? First of all, it is certainly true that successful SC and OBC applicants have a family income higher than that of the average SC and OBC family in their state. That much of the 'creamy layer' story is correct. Absolutely everything else appears to be completely false. They find that exactly the same thing is true of all SC/OBC applicants as a whole - not just the successful ones - and, indeed, even of general quota applicants, who also have family incomes above the average for their state and caste. So it is not the case that relatively richer families benefit from quotas in admission; only relatively richer families ever have children that sit for admissions tests anyway. And it is definitely not the case that richer lower-caste applicants are taking seats away from poorer general-category students; when the economists compared "applicants offered a seat in an engineering college in 1996 due to the reservation programme to those that were refused a seat but would have been admitted in the absence of the programme", they found that the family income of the former set was, on average, less than 60 per cent of the family income of the latter group.

Secondly, the 'mis-match' theory isn't supported either. If it were true, then just being admitted to an engineering college under a quota would not mean that an applicant became a more productive worker. This wasn't the case when that 'productivity increase' was measured in terms of the salary increases that those individuals were able to command and hold down.

Those salary increases, while significant, were however not as much as the salary increases an upper-caste candidate would expect if he happened to make it through the engineering admissions test: this, at last, is partial support for at least one of the standard stories, that the economy's overall productivity is hurt by prioritising lower-caste applicants. The study's authors, however, offer another explanation for this result: the choice of job for SC/OBC engineers is distorted by the fact that they find it easier to get stable but lower-paying government jobs. (They do not add that another source of distortion is possible discrimination against lower castes in the private sector job market. However, the same authors are also working on a large-scale analysis of that problem; they are using methodology that revealed large-scale implicit discrimination against African-Americans in the US private sector.)

So if the standard myths about reservations have so little support in the data, how can we account for their persistence? The last part of the study, which analyses the attitudes of successful and unsuccessful applicants, provides an eminently believable reason. It turns out that "it does not appear that those who are denied a seat in an engineering college due to the affirmative action programme end up expressing more negative attitudes towards these programmes." So all those who are responsible for perpetuating and politicising these narratives about reservations might not, after all, actually represent those who genuinely lose from the policies.

mihir.sharma@expressindia.com

http://www.indianexpress.com/story/326971.html

DOCUMENT

'Displaced come from stronger socio-economic backgrounds than displacers'

Posted online: Wednesday, June 25, 2008 at 2057 hrs

Excerpts from 'Affirmative Action in Education', by Marianne Bertrand, Rema Hanna and Sendhil Mullainathan

Why the study

There are strong beliefs that affirmative action programmes greatly harm non-minority groups and this belief dampens support for such programmes. However, these beliefs are hard to evaluate, since there is very little real evidence to date on the magnitude (if any) of the harm... In contrast, this study assembles the most comprehensive dataset available on affirmative action in higher education.

The data

We collected two data sets. First, we collected a census of all individuals who took the admissions exam in 1996... To better understand outcomes across caste groups, we interviewed about 700 households from this census of applicants between 2004 and 2006 (approximately 8-10 years after the entrance exam). We surveyed both the applicant and their parents to gauge life outcomes including income and occupation, job satisfaction, social networks, and caste identity.

How was it collected?

The enumerators first visited the parents' recorded address as of 1996 to determine if the parents still lived there. If the parents had moved, the enumerators went door to door and asked the neighbours for contact information... In total, we searched for 1,984 households.

Are quota students from the economically better off sections?

The reservation policy is associated with the admission of individuals of a lower socio-economic background. Under the assumption of a 70 per cent enrolment rate, mean parental income among the displaced individuals is Rs 14,088 compared to Rs 8,340 among the displacing individuals; 41 per cent of displaced individuals come from a household in which the head holds at least a master's degree, compared to only 14 per cent of displacing individuals; also, 59 per cent of displaced individuals attended an English-language private school, compared to only 35 per cent of displacing individuals.

Do quota students benefit?

Attending engineering college increases the monthly income of upper-caste individuals by between Rs 9,500 and Rs 13,000 (statistically significant in all four specifications); in contrast, attending engineering college increases the monthly income of lower-caste applicants by between Rs 5,500 and Rs 6,200 (statistically significant in all four specifications). Hence, the estimates... paint a less favourable picture of the welfare implications of the reservation policy: attending engineering college increases the monthly income of an upper-caste candidate by Rs 3,000 to Rs 7,000 more than it increases the monthly income of a lower-caste candidate.

The between-caste difference in the returns to an engineering education is especially large when we compare general-caste applicants to SC applicants... Interestingly, we cannot reject the hypothesis that the returns between the upper-caste group and OBC are the same.

Some conclusions:

Our analysis suggests that the affirmative action policy redistributes resources to minority groups. Contrary to the arguments of some critics, the policy does not merely crowd out economically-disadvantaged upper-caste students to make way for economically-advantaged lower-caste students. The individuals who are displaced by the programme come from stronger socio-economic backgrounds than the displacers. Hence, by targeting disadvantaged caste groups, the policy achieves some income targeting without generating any of the behavioural distortions typically associated with income targeting.

Moreover, despite their low test scores, the marginal admits from lower castes earned significant returns from attending engineering college. In other words, our findings do not support the view that the academic resources that are devoted to the lower-caste students are totally wasted on them.

The full text of the report is available online at http://www.nber.org/papers/w13926

editor@expressindia.com

http://www.indianexpress.com/story/326972.html