The purpose of this paper is to document the indirect effects of the Texas Top Ten Percent Plan on professional school degrees awarded and to propose the far reach of the law as an alternative argument in support of race-conscious admissions policies challenged under the strict scrutiny standard. Designed around the two tests of strict scrutiny,…

The effects of affirmative action on the incentives to human capital accumulation are ambiguous from a theoretical perspective and the scarce empirical evidence on the matter provides mixed results. In this paper, we address this issue by investigating the impacts of Brazil's Law of Quotas on the students' performance in the college entrance exam,…

As the fight over diversity-oriented postsecondary strategies like race-conscious admissions (commonly known as affirmative action) continues to play out in the courts with new legal cases, it is critical to better understand the ways policy actors in this arena are leveraging social science research and other types of sources in their organized…

Through a critical discourse analysis of three Asian American organizations' rhetoric around race and education, we explore the activism of Asian Americans working against affirmative action and other race-based educational policies. We examine the way these groups engage ideological discourses regarding race, civil rights, and the freedom to…

The primary focus of affirmative action is attempting to correct unjust discrimination that has occurred over an extended period of history. The focus of this research will primarily be on affirmative action in higher education. The primary method of implementation has been through admissions practices that utilize racial identity as a factor in…

Despite being academically unqualified for admission to the University of Texas at Austin, Abigail Fisher, a White female, argued that she was not admitted due to the university's diversity policy. In addition to framing postsecondary admissions as a zero-sum phenomenon, Ms. Fisher intentionally frames students of color who are admitted to the…

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 policies, priorities, and productivity of postsecondary admission offices are under a great deal of scrutiny. The current realities range from the pressures of tuition-driven institutions to deliver the majority of the university budget each fall, to more selective institutions wrestling with standards of which applicants to accept amid…

Affirmative action is an education policy adopted by higher education institutions in the 1960s, where an applicant's race is taken into account to some degree when being evaluated for admission to a college or university. The practice of affirmative action, or race conscious-admissions, has been repeatedly challenged in the legal system and…

Different from more traditional policy-making avenues, the courts provide an antipolitical arena that does not require broad agreement from various constituents for policy enactment. Seeking to guide court decisions on these policy issues, individuals and organizations have filed "amicus" briefs that increasingly include social science…

This paper investigates to what extent socioeconomic status (SES)-based affirmative action in college admissions can produce racial diversity. Using simulation models, we investigate the racial and socioeconomic distribution of students among colleges under the use of race- or SES-based affirmative action policies, or targeted, race-based…

Official rhetorics often highlight horizontality, solidarity, and shared interests as features of South-South cooperation (SSC), but scholars have argued that tensions shape SSC as much as North-South development relations. This study examines the Brazilian SSC discourse and its everyday practices. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at a newly…

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…

The University of Georgia has operated under a voluntary "race-neutral" admission policy for the past 2 decades. Using frame analysis theory, we examine university documents and interview data from 11 campus administrators responsible for diversity efforts to understand how diversity is framed at the institutional and individual levels…

There is considerable interest in the impact of policy alternatives to race-based affirmative action (AA) on under-represented minority (URM) university enrollment. Widely-implemented alternatives include percent plans, which guarantee admission to top high school students, and holistic review, in which applications are evaluated on a…