Stratification in selective college admissions persists even as colleges' criteria for evaluating merit have multiplied in efforts to increase socioeconomic and racial diversity. Middle-class and affluent families increasingly turn to privatized services, such as private college consulting, to navigate what they perceive to be a complicated and…

I study the efficacy of test-based meritocracy in college admissions by evaluating the impact of a grade-based "top percent'' policy implemented by the University of California. Eligibility in the Local Context (ELC) provided large admission advantages to the top four percent of 2001-2011 graduates from each California high school. I…

With a decision pending in two lawsuits challenging race-conscious admissions practices at Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), many observers are predicting that the US Supreme Court will significantly limit, if not completely prohibit, the use of race in college and university admissions. However if the United…

The University of California (UC) is a research-intensive institution that is widely considered to be the best public university system in the United States. A total of 147 years of sustained academic distinction has made admission to UC's nine undergraduate campuses among the most competitive in the nation. More students apply to UC than any…

The Supreme Court has established the parameters within which universities can practice race-conscious affirmative action for college admissions in a series of decisions beginning in l978. The key issues concern the educational impact of campus diversity and whether or not it is necessary to give some consideration to students' race into order to…

This essay discusses the contentious events leading to the decision by the University of California's Board of Regents to end affirmative action in admissions, hiring and contracting at the university in July 1995. This controversial decision provided momentum for California's passage of Proposition 209 the following year ending "racial…

Ratings published by the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) require selectivity in admission to educator preparation programs. NCTQ provides a list of citations to support the selectivity standard termed "strong support." A review of each citation in the list found little or no support for the standard. Original data was…

Justice Goodwin Liu reexamined seminal affirmative action in higher education legal cases beginning with the landmark 1978 case, "Regents of the University of California v. Bakke" and leading up to the U.S. Supreme Court's 2003 decision in "Gratz v. Bollinger." Liu argued that the "Bakke and Gratz" lawsuits were…

One of the important arguments by critics of affirmative action is that it actually hurts the students it is supposed to help by subjecting them to the "stigma" of being admitted under policies explicitly seeking campus diversity. Such students, this theory argues, must feel embarrassed and uncomfortable as a result and would prefer to…

Elite public schools must use some method of selecting their students. Given the desirability of this scarce resource, these methods are closely scrutinized. Demographic and other changes in the school districts may make unstable procedures that were deemed successful at one point. This "recurring problem" is the subject of this article,…

The advent of the modern form of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), brought to bear by the combination of the Educational Testing Service (ETS) and Harvard's former president James Bryant Conant (Lemann 1999), was designed to promote the recognition of talent and intellect, wherever they may be found. Their aim was to provide greater educational…

This article reports the results of a new study on the impact of bans on race-conscious admissions policies which seem to confirm what many critics of affirmative action have long suspected: It is Asian-Americans, rather than whites, who are most disadvantaged by elite universities' consideration of ethnicity and race. Left unanswered are the…

Bakke vs The Regents of the University of California is examined in historical perspective and in light of recent developments in the area of reverse discrimination. An attempt is made to analyze the nature of the California Supreme Court's holding, demonstrate the errors in the logic, and expose the potentially catastrophic results should the…

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…

Many deregulated public charter schools are emphasizing parental involvement. But to what extent do the initiators of these charter schools use parent involvement and parent contracts to restrict enrollment to students whose parents demonstrate the desired commitments and willingness to meet school expectations? To explore this question, this…