"National CrossTalk" is a publication of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education. The National Center promotes public policies that enhance opportunities for quality education and training beyond high school. The primary purpose of "National CrossTalk" is to stimulate informed discussion and debate of higher…

Although there is a great deal of disagreement about how to handle the changes that confront postsecondary education, few will suggest that being wedded to the status quo is sufficient. Many contend that the future of higher education is up for grabs; how those of us in the "industry" respond will determine whether American higher…

While policy-makers and educational administrators decry the underrepresentation of African American students in institutions of higher education, groups like the Center for Individual Rights (CIR) work to limit African American presence on campuses even more. While innovative programmers build programs that will attract African American students…

Conservative critiques of higher education rely on liberal doses of cash. Behind the conservative critique of U.S. higher education is a fervent commitment to ideals, to be sure--but there's also a sizable amount of conservative cash. The Bradley, Earhart, Castle Rock, and John M. Olin foundations have contributed lavishly to guidebooks aimed at…

For most of their history, two separate, but related, after-school education programs operated independently, coordinated by separate teams of university and community partners. When the existence of the programs was threatened, a community-university coalition formed in an effort to sustain them. This coincided with the university-community…

This article argues strong affirmative action for HBCUs involving federal R&D funds and congressional earmarks is needed. Members of Congress must recognize the essential role HBCUs have played in providing educational opportunities for African Americans and economically marginalized White Americans. The "No Child Left Behind" slogan for K-12…

Using Bowen and Bok's data from 23 selective colleges, we fit multilevel logit models to test two hypotheses with implications for affirmative action and group differences in attainment of science, math, or engineering (SME) degrees. Hypothesis 1, that differences in precollege academic preparation will explain later SME graduation disparities,…

Advocates of racial preferences from the Harvard Civil Rights Project have criticized an initiative designed to provide race-neutral admissions to universities in Florida. George La Noue rejects their criticism, which, he says, confuses the definitions of affirmative action, establishes nonexistent criteria, and ignores crucial elements that…

When the author left California for the University of Minnesota twenty-five years ago, he vowed never again to become involved in departmental or university politics. He'd had enough of that at California State, Los Angeles, and he was determined to devote his full attention, apart from teaching, to several scholarly projects that had simmered so…

In July 1995, the University of California's Board of Regents voted to ban consideration of race and ethnicity in admissions and employment--a ban that was extended to all state agencies when the voters of California approved Proposition 209 in November 1996. This paper discusses the national controversy over affirmative action and analyzes the…

In the wake of the Supreme Court's 2003 decision upholding admissions preferences, affirmative action remains a deeply divisive issue. This tendency to frame the argument over preferences in terms of fundamental values is common to both sides of the debate. Because the nation's history with respect to race is so painful, the resulting argument is…

In a "Stanford Law Review" article, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) law professor Richard Sander claimed to statistically prove that affirmative action at American law schools actually depressed the number of African Americans who become lawyers by "mismatching" them at schools where they were in over their heads academically. This…

This paper describes the college admission process through the conceptual lens of Dickason's (2001) phases of affirmative action. The first phase, obligatory affirmative action, describes the history of affirmative action and the impact on college admission. The second phase, voluntary affirmative action, describes University of West Florida's…

The college participation rates of African Americans and Latinos continue to lag behind those of other racial and ethnic groups in the United States, despite the efforts of financial aid and affirmative action policies. Two recent federal policies that are "work-first" in nature threaten to further exacerbate racial and ethnic…

In exploring the relationship between cultural capital, symbolic violence and the diversification of the curriculum the notion of commoditization of race in higher education is developed. The term first and foremost emphasizes how students from "disadvantaged" racialized communities remain significantly underrepresented at selective…