Paper short abstract:

Caste-level educational mobility in India remains extremely low over the last 150 years, and imperfect compliance to reservation policy hurts the mobility of underprivileged groups. Contrary to previous scholarship, this paper argues that even in the absence of endogamy, the rigidity persists.

Paper long abstract:

Introducing a large new data set on college graduates in India (1857-2017), I show that educational mobility in India during this period was extremely low at the level of caste groups. By simulating counterfactual estimates, I show that perfect compliance to reservation policy could have substantially increased the rate of social mobility for the underprivileged lower caste and tribal groups. Most of the previous literature argues that the rigidity in Indian society is driven by caste-based endogamy. However, by analyzing social mobility at the level of exogamous sub-caste groups, I show that the absence of endogamy among the sub-groups does not promote higher rates of social mobility for those sub-groups.

Another common explanation is that affirmative action may select relatively less meritorious students from underprivileged backgrounds, which in turn leads to 'merit-based mismatch', reflected by higher rates of drop-out and switching of majors. I present evidence that the difference between (rank at) admission and (rank at) graduation is not specifically different for lower caste groups when compared to their upper caste peers. I further show that the distributional characteristics of graduation ranks for lower caste students remains consistent across decades, particularly since the introduction of reservation policy.

Threading these observations together, this paper suggests that seemingly informal yet historically persistent discriminatory institutions are a hindrance to accumulation of human capital and social mobility in the long run, particularly for underprivileged social groups.