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In this research article, Pamela R. Bennett and Amy Lutz offer new hypotheses about how state bans on affirmative action affect application decisions based on students’ beneficiary positions vis-à-vis affirmative action and evaluate them for black, white, Latino, and Asian American students separately. They posit that bans discourage applications to selective colleges from prospective students who benefit from affirmative action (black and Latino) and encourage applications from prospective students who do not benefit from the policy (white and Asian American). Members of nonbeneficiary groups that have strong academic credentials are more responsive to bans because they are best positioned for admission under restrictions on race-conscious admissions policies. Citing results from the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002–2006, the authors show how state restrictions on race-conscious admissions have contributed to racial inequality in higher education by further drawing into elite institutions’ application pools racial groups that already account for most of their students while also raising the chances that students from those groups will be admitted. 

Althoughaffirmativeactionincollegeadmissionsisconstitutionallypermissible,several states prohibit it. We investigate whether bans push black and Latino students fro m in-state public selective colleges to other types of postsecondary institutions, thus contributing to talent loss among these groups. Unlike most other studies, we analyze national data (the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009) so that we can follow students across state lines. We find no evidence that students from ban states shift from one type of selective college to another; that is, from in-state public flagships to in-state private ones or selective colleges in other states. However, the odds of attending a nonselective college, instead of an in-state public selective college, are al most three times higher among blacks and Latinos in ban states compared with their counterparts in states without bans. We argue that bans on affirmative action may contribute to talent loss among black and Latino students. 

During the 1990s and early 2000s, the affirmative action context in the United States changed. Affirmative action in higher education was banned in several states, and the Supreme Court ruled in Grutter (2003) that affirmative action, while constitutional, should be implemented via holistic evaluation of applicants. In this article, we use two datasets to examine how affirmative action context relates to academic outcomes at selective colleges and universities in the United States before and after the Grutter decision and in states with and without bans on affirmative action. Underrepresented minority students earned higher grades in the period after the Grutter decision than before it, indicating that the holistic evaluation method required by Grutter may enhance educational outcomes for these students. In contrast, we find no support for the idea, proposed by critics of the policy, that banning affirmative action leads to better collegiate outcomes for Black and Latino students at selective institutions.