TY - JOUR
T1 - Can a summer make a difference? The impact of the American Economic Association Summer Program on minority student outcomes
AU - Becker, Charles M.
AU - Rouse, Cecilia Elena
AU - Chen, Mingyu
N1 - Funding Information:
Other professions offer slightly different kinds of programs with the shared goal of increasing diversity. For instance, the American Sociological Association runs the Minority Fellowship Program that provides mentoring and financial support to minority applicants to graduate programs and current Ph.D. students. As another example, the Minority Legal Education Resources operates the Bar Process Management Program to assist minorities in passing the Illinois Bar Exam and provide them professional advice. Assessments, and especially those that attempt to ascertain causality, are rare. A less formal assessment of a public policy program appears in MacAllum and Gallup-Black (2003) . The political science profession's efforts, which include the Ralph Bunche Summer Institute, are loosely but not causally assessed in Monforti and Michelson (2008) .
Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 Elsevier Ltd
Copyright:
Copyright 2017 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2016/8/1
Y1 - 2016/8/1
N2 - In the 1970s, the American Economic Association (AEA) was one of several professional associations to launch a summer program with the goal of increasing racial and ethnic diversity in its profession. In this paper we estimate the effectiveness of the AEA's program which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first to rigorously study such a summer program. Using a comparison group consisting of those who applied to, but did not attend, the program and controlling for an array of background characteristics, we find that program participants were over 40 percentage points more likely to apply to and attend a Ph.D. program in economics, 26 percentage points more likely to complete a Ph.D., and about 15 percentage points more likely to ever work in an economics-related academic job. Using our estimates, we calculate that the program may directly account for 17–21 percent of the Ph.D.s awarded to minorities in economics over the past 20 years.
AB - In the 1970s, the American Economic Association (AEA) was one of several professional associations to launch a summer program with the goal of increasing racial and ethnic diversity in its profession. In this paper we estimate the effectiveness of the AEA's program which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first to rigorously study such a summer program. Using a comparison group consisting of those who applied to, but did not attend, the program and controlling for an array of background characteristics, we find that program participants were over 40 percentage points more likely to apply to and attend a Ph.D. program in economics, 26 percentage points more likely to complete a Ph.D., and about 15 percentage points more likely to ever work in an economics-related academic job. Using our estimates, we calculate that the program may directly account for 17–21 percent of the Ph.D.s awarded to minorities in economics over the past 20 years.
KW - AEA Summer Program
KW - Academic preparation program effectiveness
KW - Education program assessments
KW - Minority doctorates in Economics
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U2 - 10.1016/j.econedurev.2016.03.009
DO - 10.1016/j.econedurev.2016.03.009
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84989897586
SN - 0272-7757
VL - 53
SP - 46
EP - 71
JO - Economics of Education Review
JF - Economics of Education Review
ER -