Do education requirements cost police departments diversity? Evidence from Large U.S. Municipal Agencies, 2000-2020

National reviews of American policing have long urged both college-educated officers and departments that reflect the communities they serve, and critics warn that the first goal undermines the second because degree attainment differs by race and sex. This study tests that claim with a balanced panel of 229 large municipal police departments observed in six waves of the Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics survey (2000–2020; 1,374 agency-years), linked to Census data. Poisson pseudo-maximum-likelihood models with agency and wave fixed effects estimate how within-agency changes in minimum education requirements relate to the shares of sworn officers who are women and who are Black; switcher-based difference-in-differences estimators, new-hire data, and community-police parity ratios supplement the main models. When agencies reported some-college, associate, or bachelor’s requirements, the shares of women and Black officers were no lower than when the same agencies required a high school diploma. In the preferred specification, 95% confidence intervals exclude reductions larger than about 4.4% in either group’s share, and no alternative specification yields a significant negative estimate. The positive associations that appear—bachelor’s requirements with women, some-college requirements with Black officers—are sensitive to sample and specification. Higher reported education requirements were not associated with lower representation of women or Black officers in the sworn workforces of large U.S. municipal departments during this period, but the evidence does not show that they increased it.