Are Students Roadblocks to Academic Diversity? Evidence from a Natural Field Experiment

Abstract

We designed a natural field experiment to investigate the consequences of introducing a more diverse faculty on student sorting inside an academic program. We used fictive teacher names (immigrant/native; male/female) as a salient attribute of the list of otherwise identical elective classes in economics. We find a robust same-type bias in preferences for teachers. The same-type biases are significant on the full sample but stronger among low-skilled and female students. Our results point to an intersectional mechanism; students are significantly less likely to select classes led by a teacher of the opposite gender and ethnicity, implying that the students’ same-sex bias primarily affects ethnic minority teachers. While the ethnicity bias is robust to default nudging, elevating the opposite gender as the default option reduces or even eliminates the selection bias. We also show that, due to these student preferences, underrepresented teachers may receive significantly weaker students under standard admission systems.