Abstract

Underrepresented minority (URM) college students have been steadily earning degrees in relatively less lucrative fields of study since the mid-1990s, especially at public research universities. We construct a novel 50-year university transcript database and employ a staggered difference-in-difference design to investigate GPA-based major restriction policies, which are increasingly popular at public universities. Restrictions decrease average URM enrollment shares by 20 percent without generating observable efficiency gains. Using first-term course enrollments to identify students’ intended majors, we find that major restrictions disproportionately lead URM students toward less lucrative majors, largely explaining the growth in within-institution ethnic stratifications since the 1990s.