The Impact of Drug Laws on College Enrollment for Latinx Young Men

• In Event: Exploring Carcerality in the Pre-K–20 Pipeline

Abstract

Although college enrollment and completion rates have increased over the past thirty years, access to higher education has not been uniform across racial groups. In 2010, the respective rates of college enrollment for Latinx, Black, and White 18-24 year olds were 32%, 38%, and 43% (Snyder, De Brey, & Dillow, 2018). In addition to racial gaps, differences in tertiary education outcomes exist by gender. Gender gaps in college enrollment are larger in the Latinx community than in other racial or ethnic groups (Snyder, De Brey, & Dillow, 2018). In this paper, I measure the impact of the passage of the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act on the likelihood of college enrollment for young Latinx men. The 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act criminalized possession of drugs, established mandatory minimum sentences for drug possession and trafficking offenses, differentiated penalties for crack cocaine as opposed to powder cocaine, allowed for seizure of assets, and increased funding for state and local drug control efforts.
States have a wide variety of drug laws. I use this variation in state law in order to explore whether states that have more lenient marijuana and cocaine laws also have a higher likelihood of college enrollment. My hypothesis is that states that were less punitive with regards to cocaine and marijuana possession and distribution prior to the law change would also be less punitive after 1986. As a result, these states would have fewer drug arrests after 1986 and higher college enrollment rates for Black young men when compared to other demographic groups.
I use the October Current Population Survey (CPS) supplements, for the years 1984-1992, to examine trends in enrollment by race and gender. My second source of data contains the state and federal penalties for marijuana and cocaine possession and distribution in three years: 1986, 1988, and 1990. For each state and year, I collected data on the minimum and maximum penalty in months of imprisonment for the first offence of both possession and distribution of cocaine and marijuana based on specified amounts in grams. I employ a difference-in-differences (DD) as a quasi-experimental identification strategy to measure the effects of the Anti-Drug Act of 1986 on college enrollment and graduation rates for Latinx men. I propose to compare outcomes for Latinx men to another demographic group before and after a policy change using DD. In this study, I first have pre- and post- law change and race as the first two differences. In the next set of analyses, I have race as the first difference. As the second difference in the model, I use geographic variation based on changes in state laws around marijuana possession and distribution.
This is one of the first papers to measure the impact of the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act on Latinx college enrollment. Given the impact of the War on Drugs on young persons of color, this study quantifies the impact on life outcomes.

Author

• Tolani Britton, University of California - Berkeley