Opinion – Rodrigo Zeidan: Ten-year anniversary of the quota law should be celebrated with pride

“I am in favor of quotas, but as long as they are for income”, “quota students cannot keep up with classes” and “quotas are easily defrauded” are some of the common arguments in the mythology that there would be a Brazilian racial democracy. But these arguments are simply wrong, according to the scientific consensus on the matter.

In a work with Silvio Almeida, Inácio Bó and Neil Lewis, Jr., we analyzed all scientific articles on quotas in Brazil published in the main scientific journals in the world. The results could not be clearer: “quota” students perform excellently and do not slow anyone down, income quotas are not enough to increase student body diversity, and there is no evidence that cheating is a systemic problem.

Francis and Tannuri-Pianto use access to comprehensive administrative data and find that, over the course of their studies, students targeted by affirmative action policies close any initial gaps in their grades relative to other students. When they graduate, their averages are not significantly different from other students.

Valente and Berry complement these results and find that students admitted to public universities under the federal affirmative action law have similar levels to students not admitted, using observations from national exams of more than 1 million students.

Still, Pelegrini and coauthors find indirect evidence of greater effort on the part of target students in a sample of 130,728 students. The differences between quota and non-quota students decrease as students approach graduation. There is no indication of negative externalities on the performance of other students, which is corroborated by Lépine and Estevan. They simply cannot find any study that shows that the performance of quota students is poor.

The effects on labor market performance are also significant. Francis-Tan and Tannuri-Pianto show that students who enter through affirmative action are much more likely to work as a principal or manager. But not everything is perfect. Interestingly, the gains in the labor market for students who entered by racial quotas are mainly concentrated in male candidates. Attending college or graduating significantly increases earnings for both male quota and non-quota applicants, but does not increase the salaries of female students.
Regarding income quotas, Vieira and Arends-Kuenning found that universities that only adopted income quotas did not have significant changes in the racial profile of their students, while those that used racial quotas managed to diversify the student body.

Also in this case, there is no indication of systemic fraud. Francis and Tannuri-Pianto find that the introduction of racial quotas induced some students to misrepresent their racial identity but inspired others to consider themselves black. However, this misrepresentation is minimal, in relation to the total number of students enrolled for the admission tests.

About reverse racism, the scientific literature says nothing, because nobody cares about nonsense. This year marks the tenth anniversary of the quota law in Brazil, passed in 2012. It’s not just for us to celebrate, but for us to celebrate with pride.