Until the 1960s, Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) were practically the only institutions of higher learning open to Blacks in the US. Using nationally representative data files from 1970s and 1990s college attendees, we find that in the 1970s HBCU matriculation was associated...

This paper analyzes the impact of high school household income and scholastic ability on post-secondary enrollment in South Africa. Using longitudinal data from the Cape Area Panel Study (CAPS), we analyze the large racial gaps in the proportion of high school graduates who enroll in university...

After decades of narrowing, the achievement gap between black and white school children widened in the 1990s - a period when the labor market rewards for education were increasing. This presents an important puzzle for economists. In this chapter, I investigate the extent to which economic...

The role of racial prejudice in driving white racial policy opposition has been the subject of a prolonged debate among researchers of American race relations. To a very considerable extent, this debate hinges on an ongoing dispute over the nature and measurement of racial prejudice. Contention...

Charles Mills has outlined racialized ways of knowing which he identifies as an epistemology of ignorance, necessary to maintain white privilege in the context of commitments to formal equality. Ignorance is maintained both through racist systems of knowing as well as through systematized...

Racial segregation is often blamed for some of the achievement gap between blacks and whites. We study the effects of school and neighborhood segregation on the relative SAT scores of black students across different metropolitan areas, using large microdata samples for the 1998-2001 test...

Despite its distance from both the current and past U.S.-Mexican border and its relatively short history as a destination for Latin American immigrants, North Carolina has become the state with the fastest growing Latino population in the country. Given this demographic boom, I set out to learn...