The paper examines a 'circulatory' system of gender inequity in Australian universities where gender bias prevents women from accessing senior decision-making roles and stultifies their capacity to act as gender change agents. It has been mooted that equity quotas for senior roles can derail this circuit of male privilege in academia. Yet a…

Many institutions of higher learning aim to promote greater racial diversity to harness learning benefits and foster a sense of inclusion. Nevertheless, the institutional pursuit of racial diversity is difficult to benchmark. The current constitutional boundary limits the use of race to promote the diversity in college admissions to a…

This study examines the perceptions of university students from inter-ethnic marriage families (hereafter as multicultural students) on their experiences with affirmative action policy. Ten university multicultural students who entered leading universities through affirmative action amidst the highly competitive higher education entrance exams in…

The point in describing the work conducted at a now-elite university (Boston College) and in the quoted commentary in this article is that a stronger case can be made that America's most elite institutions (like Yale and Harvard) could and should be doing more--not less--in supporting affirmative action. The author proudly congratulates his alma…

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…

We study university admissions under a centralized system that uses grades and standardized test scores to match applicants to university programs. In the context of this system, we explore affirmative action policies that seek to narrow the gap between the admission rates of different socio-demographic groups while still accepting students with…

Most education and legal scholarship overlook gendered-race themes in pre-Brown v. Board of Education desegregation higher education cases that remain relevant to examining post-"Brown" race-conscious admissions cases. The author engaged critical race feminism to create a counterstory with Ada Lois Sipuel Fisher, a U.S. Supreme Court…

Affirmative action policies are oftentimes pitted against the need of universities to maintain meritocratic standards in enrollment. The current study tackles this institutional dilemma against the standard of student attrition. It does so by analyzing records of 41,483 undergraduate students who attended the Hebrew University of Jerusalem…

Since the post-George Floyd protests and Black Lives Matter/Antifa riots of last summer, the left has become increasingly insistent about the need to "do more" to eliminate what it sees as "systemic racism"--a demand that implicitly, and often explicitly, rejects as woefully inadequate the results of what is by now almost fifty…

Affirmative action in higher education can lead to mismatch, where students admitted through preferential treatment struggle academically due to inadequate preparation before college. Although some students may face initial challenges, by providing access to quality education for talented individuals who might have otherwise been overlooked due to…

Following the U.S. Supreme Court's 2023 decision in "SFFA v. Harvard" to upend nearly fifty years of legal precedent for race-conscious admissions, this article summarizes arguments grounded in decades of social science research that sought to dispel the erroneous claims put forth by the plaintiffs. In critiquing the inaccuracies and…

This article examines how Affirmative Action was used to govern access to higher education for the disadvantaged. In 1991, a gender-based Affirmative Action policy was incorporated into college admission in Uganda. Using existing empirical data at district and college levels, the article accounts for the categories of women for whom the Uganda's…

When students are admitted through admissions preferences--especially when the preferences are large and the students pursue demanding fields of study--do they benefit from going to a more selective school? Or, instead, do they suffer from being "mismatched" with their peers--falling behind, becoming frustrated, receiving low grades, and…

Research has shown that access to technology industry pathways and support for recruitment, retention, and advancement through technology careers remain inequitable for Black talent due to various systemic barriers. To help address this issue, Digital Promise conducted research that centers the voices and lived experiences of Black workers and…