How Race Affects Educational Attainment

Contrary to mainstream belief, statistics show that being black or Hispanic in America increases an individual's expected years of schooling as soon as you control for one variable.  Any guesses on what that variable may be: parents' income, parents' educational attainment, urban school district, family owning a home, gender?  The correlations between years of educational attainment and being black or Hispanic are still negative after adjusting for something that is seemingly as important as family household income.  The answer: achievement test score.

For students who performed equally well on an achievement test given to a sample of 3796 high school seniors, being black or Hispanic will add a little more than .3 years of schooling.  (For those of you who care, this result is statistically significant at the 1% level using a 2-sided t-test.)  If you ignore controlling this variable, being Hispanic subtracts .2 years and being black subtracts .5 years of schooling.  In addition, a regression on students who performed above the 96th percentile shows that race no longer becomes a (statistically) significant factor and expected years of schooling increases to 15.5 years.

Controlling for end-of-high-school academic achievement being the primary corrector the mainstream bias about race and education may not be a surprise for some, myself included.  The more interesting phenomenon is the positive correlation between race and schooling after controlling for achievement.  I don't have any good idea why this is the case.  Feel free to share any hypotheses you may have.

Note: I used STATA to run regressions on this data set supplied by Professor Cecilia Rouse of Princeton University.