Affirmative Action, Faculty Productivity and Caste Interactions: Evidence from Engineering Colleges in India
NBER Working Papers · 2026 · Robert W. Fairlie、Saurabh Khanna、Prashant Loyalka、Gagandeep S. Sachdeva
中文摘要
平权行动项目常因担心其导致工人生产率下降和效率损失而受到批评。我们研究在雇用约束被强制施加于雇主且通常很可能具约束力的情境下，受益于一项激进平权政策的工人的相对生产率。在印度，高校须将大约50%的教师聘用名额保留给来自弱势种姓和社会阶层群体的个人。我们收集并分析了来自印度50所工程与技术学院的全国代表性样本的数据，其中一些学院将学生随机分派到课堂。我们发现，保留类别教师比未通过保留制度聘用的普通类别教师受教育程度更低、教授职级更低、学术工作年限更少。然而，即便资历较低，我们在包括课程成绩、后续课程成绩、标准化考试分数、辍学、出勤、读研计划和毕业等一系列广泛的指标上，均未发现保留类别教师与普通类别教师在教学质量上存在有意义的差异。事实上，我们发现，至少就课程成绩的即期效应而言，由保留类别教师授课的学生表现略优于由普通类别教师授课的学生。我们还估计了保留类别教师对保留类别学生相对课程表现和更长期结果的"与我相似的老师"(teacher-like-me)效应，且无法拒绝零效应假设。此外，即便面对针对教师聘用配额的潜在歧视和不满，普通类别学生在保留类别教师授课的课堂中的表现仍略优于在普通类别教师授课的课堂中的表现。最后，保留类别与普通类别教师在若干科研生产率和行政服务指标上的差异的估计值量级较小，且在统计上与零无显著差异。这些发现对世界各地许多国家以及现已身为世界人口第一大国的印度围绕平权行动项目的激烈争论具有启示意义。
Abstract
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.