The recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions "Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College" (2023) and "Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina et al." (2023), hereafter collectively referred to as "SFFA v. Harvard," have garnered attention, especially among…

The study investigates a tension between affirmative action scholars who hypothesize that affirmative action bans would increase underrepresented minority students' STEM college completions and scholars who have empirically estimated declines. It also questions results that that find no existence of a STEM penalty (compared to non-STEM) caused by…

In a plurality opinion in the 1978 Supreme Court case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, Justice Lewis Powell held that colleges and universities could consider an applicant's race in the admissions process in order to attain a diverse student body. In a pair of cases that will be decided in the current term, the Supreme Court has…

Educational research, policy, advocacy organizations, and higher education policy scholars, have noted the significance of race-conscious admissions in the dismantling of the structural and material racial and class barriers that reflect the historical role of colleges and universities. In this essay, the author enacts a different reading of the…

Attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion threaten to undo much of the work of creating and maintaining diverse learning and working environments for students, faculty, and staff. In honor of ACPA's 100th anniversary, we reflect on the current threats to the campus racial climate, highlight research that informs our scholarship and practice, and…

This paper seeks to identify strategies for anti-racist higher education, drawing on scholarship that locates structural racism in global and local centre-periphery relations. We first examine how the centre-periphery divide has been identified and challenged in anti-racist intellectual and political movements, focusing on exchanges and solidarity…

In this research article, Pamela R. Bennett and Amy Lutz offer new hypotheses about how state bans on affirmative action affect application decisions based on students' beneficiary positions vis-à-vis affirmative action and evaluate them for black, white, Latino, and Asian American students separately. They posit that bans discourage applications…

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…

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…

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…

In this article, we examine and explore how the recent US Supreme Court case on affirmative action within higher education will shape and contextualize disproportionate minority representation and its monitoring within a K-12 public school context for students with disabilities. That is, as the litigation and ultimate judicial decision shape how…

In response to disparities in postsecondary access, governments have enacted policies to facilitate the admission of traditionally underrepresented students. Known as affirmative action in the United States, the legal justification of this approach has varied. This article describes the legal and political history of affirmative action, the social…

Social inclusion policy in higher education--also referenced as affirmative action, reservations, schedules, or antidiscrimination--has been used widely to promote equity and access for minority and historically discriminated subgroups who wish to participate in tertiary education. Inclusion is often protected de jure through a country's…

This paper estimates the long-run impacts of banning affirmative action on men and women from under-represented minority (URM) racial and ethnic groups in the United States. Using data from the US Census and American Community Survey, we use a difference-in-differences framework to compare the college degree completion, graduate degree completion,…