Affirmative action in Brazilian universities: Effects on the enrollment of targeted groups

This paper investigates how the adoption of affirmative action for college admission affected the enrollment of students from disadvantaged backgrounds in Brazil. We explore the time heterogeneity of policy adoption by universities to identify the policy impacts while accounting for contemporaneous confounding effects. Our study shows that the adoption of affirmative action increased the enrollment of students from groups explicitly targeted by each policy, particularly public high-school students and Blacks.11The standard racial/skin-color categories used by the Brazilian Statistical Agency (IBGE) include: Branco (light-skinned), Preto (black-skinned), Amarelo (yellow – mainly referring to Chinese and Japanese origin), Pardo (brown-skinned or mixed) and Indígena (Indigenous). The Portuguese term “Pardo” is especially ambiguous (Cicalò, 2008), and any direct translation to English may be misleading. Therefore, we use the original Portuguese terms to refer to the standard racial categories used in Brazil. However, Brazilian affirmative action policies with a racial component were mostly defined to target the combined group of Pretos and Pardos, without any differentiation between those groups. Therefore, in this paper, we use the English word “Black” to refer to the combined group of Pretos and Pardos. We note that the word negro is sometimes used in Brazil to refer to that same combined group, however, this is not a consistent definition, especially in terms of racial identity as not all pardos may consider themselves as negros (Francis & Tannuri-Pianto, 2012a). Therefore, our definition of the term “Black” should not be considered a direct translation of the Portuguese term Negro. We also demonstrate that these effects were concentrated within more competitive and more prestigious academic programs. Lastly, we find that universities that adopted affirmative action policies with explicit racial criteria experienced an increase in the enrollment of Black students whereas universities that adopted race-neutral policies had no significant changes in the racial profile of their students. These results indicate that affirmative action policies were successful in improving access to higher education for targeted groups. However, we also identify important limitations of these policies.