Affirmative Action, Faculty Productivity and Caste Interactions: Evidence from Engineering Colleges in India

Affirmative action programs are often criticized because of concerns that they result in lower worker productivity and efficiency losses. We study the relative productivity of workers benefiting from an aggressive affirmative action policy in a setting where hiring constraints are mandated upon employers and are typically likely to bind. In India, colleges are required to reserve approximately 50 percent of faculty hires for individuals from disadvantaged caste and social class groups. We collect and analyze data from a nationally representative sample of 50 engineering and technology colleges in India, some of which randomly assign students to classrooms. We find that reservation category faculty have lower levels of education, lower professorial ranks and fewer years of experience in academia than general category faculty who are not hired through reservations. Yet, even with lower qualifications, we do not detect meaningful differences in instructional quality between reservation category faculty and general category faculty across a wide range of measures that include course grades, follow-on course grades, standardized test scores, dropout, attendance, graduate school plans, and graduation. In fact, we find that, at least for immediate effects on course grades, students taught by reservation category faculty perform slightly better than students taught by general category faculty. We also estimate “teacher-like-me” effects of reservation category faculty on the relative course performance and longer-term outcomes of reservation category students and cannot reject the hypothesis of null effects. Furthermore, even in the face of potential discrimination and resentment against faculty hiring quotas, general category students perform slightly better in classrooms taught by reservation category faculty than general category faculty. Finally, estimates of differences between reservation category and general category faculty in several measures of research productivity and administrative service are small in magnitude and not statistically different from zero. The findings have implications for the heated debates over affirmative action programs found in many countries around the world and in India which is now the largest country in the world.