The Effects of Affirmative Action on STEM Majors

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At Duke, once you condition on gender, African Americans were more likely to want to make your in STEM and economics. But they switched out at a way higher rate than whites. So how do we know that if these students who were hoping to be pre-med students or computer engineering students, economic students, then ended up struggling academically? It depends again on what outcome you're looking at.

Peter Arcidiacono is an economist at Duke University and an expert on affirmative action. Arcidiacono served as an expert witness for Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. (SFFA) in SFFA v. Harvard.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Peter Arcidiacono discuss the role that racial preferences have played in the admissions processes of elite American universities in recent decades; the workarounds that universities are likely to use in the wake of the recent Supreme Court decision; and why real progress for less privileged students will require fundamental changes that look beyond the admissions practices of a few elite universities.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

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