The CEP Affirmative Action program: Mismatch, Spillovers and Peer-effects.

Aya Jibet

In this project, we study the effect of an Equal Opportunity Program (CEP) launched by Sciences Po. The objective of this initiative was to diversify the student body at Sciences Po and bring new possibilities in higher education (and beyond) for students from underprivileged social backgrounds. We first focus on evaluating the spillover on students from the partnering high schools using a difference-in-difference strategy. In this part, we focus on disadvantaged students’ college application and enrollment patterns and the effects of the CEP policy in increasing low-income and disadvantaged students’ enrollment at selective colleges. Then, to test the mismatch hypothesis- according to which affirmative action policies could have negative effects on the targeted minority students by over-matching them to schools that are above their academic ability- we evaluate the benefit of enrolling at Sciences Po for students who were on the margin of getting admitted. We use admission data on students who were first deemed admissible in the first admission stage and exploit the random assignment of oral examiners by implementing a judge fixed effect design. Finally, we study the peer effects resulting from the introduction of social and racial diversity in an elite institution. We will run online experiments to investigate how interactions with CEP students changed individuals’ behaviors and implicit biases.

About Aya Jibet

Aya Jibet is a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at New York University. Her research focuses on the economics of education and labor economics. She is interested in the relationship between access to higher education, inequality, and social mobility. With a focus on understanding what type of policies can promote social mobility for disadvantaged students and reduce barriers to education. Her work combines economic theory, large-scale administrative data, and quasi-experimental research designs to estimate the impacts of these policies. In her dissertation, Aya explores the various effects of an Affirmative Action programimplementedbySciencesPo, one of the elite universities in France. Including the distributional consequences, the effects on students’ application and enrollment patterns but also the interaction effects stemming from the introduction of social and racial diversity in a PWI. Before beginning her graduate studies, Aya, originally from Morocco, earned a B.Sc. in Applied Mathematics from Pantheon Sorbonne University and a B.A. in Economics and Social Sciences from Sciences Po Paris.