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Title: What Does the AFQT Really Measure: Race, Wages, Schooling and the AFQT Score
Resulting in 1 citation.
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Rodgers, William M., III Spriggs, William E. |
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What Does the AFQT Really Measure: Race, Wages, Schooling and the AFQT Score The Review of Black Political Economy 24,4 (Spring 1996): 13-46. Also: http://www.springerlink.com/content/52t6v2n352q01807/ Cohort(s): NLSY79 Publisher: National Economic Association Keyword(s): Armed Forces Qualifications Test (AFQT); Discrimination, Job; Family Background and Culture; Family Environment; Job Skills; Racial Differences; School Quality; Schooling; Test Scores/Test theory/IRT; Wage Gap Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher. Recent literature on the black-white wage gap continues to show that a large residual due to race remains, and during the 1980s, it grew in size. One interpretation is that the residual gap measures the existence of labor market discrimination. Another interpretation is that imbedded in the residual gap are racial differences in unobservable skills that grew during the 1980s, or that racial differences in these skills remained constant, but their returns grew. To account for these unobservable skills, researchers switch to the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). The NLSY contains the Armed Forces Qualification Test (AFQT), a direct measure of skills obtained via family and school environments.When researchers include the AFQT composite score, the black-white wage gap narrows. Doing this, they assume that the AFQT score is a racially unbiased predictor of wages. We present evidence that generates doubt that the AFQT score is racially unbiased. We first show t hat F-Tests reject the hypothesis that AFQT scores equally predict African American and white wages. Further, when the components of the AFQT are used to predict wages, instead of the composite score, the coefficients on the verbal components are positive and significant for African Americans, while the coefficient on the math component is basically zero. The relationships for whites are exactly the opposites. Second, we show that a significant difference in the ability of family background, school quality, and a set of psychological characteristics to estimate black and white test scores exists. Third, we present our estimates of the black-white wage gap where a racially unbiased AFQT composite score has been used to control for racial differences in job skills. To construct this score, we estimate a regression of the AFQT scores of whites on an exhaustive list of family background, school quality, and individual psychological characteristics. When the two-step estimated score is used, it reduces the mean square error of the wage regression, has a significant independent effect on wages, and a very small effect on the race coefficient. |
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Bibliography Citation
Rodgers, William M., III and William E. Spriggs. "What Does the AFQT Really Measure: Race, Wages, Schooling and the AFQT Score." The Review of Black Political Economy 24,4 (Spring 1996): 13-46.
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