Cameron, S. V., & Heckman, J. J. (2001). The Dynamics of Educational Attainment for Black, Hispanic, and White Males. Journal of Political Economy, 109(3), 455-499.
This paper estimates a dynamic model of schooling attainment to investigate the sources of racial and ethnic disparity in college attendance. Parental income in the childs adolescent years is a strong predictor of this disparity. This is widely interpreted to mean that credit constraints facing families during the college going years are important. Using NLSY data, we find that it is the longrun factors associated with parental background and family environment, and not credit constraints facing prospective students in the collegegoing years, that account for most of the racialethnic collegegoing differential. Policies aimed at improving these long term family and environmental factors are more likely to be successful in eliminating college attendance differentials than short term tuition reduction and family income supplement policies aimed at families with college age children.
Full article can be found here:
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/321014