In public discourse around higher education, diversity based on socioeconomic status (SES) is often presented as an alternative to diversity based on race/ethnicity. In particular, the Supreme Court's 2023 ban on race-based affirmative action gave new energy to calls for SES-based diversity efforts. This dissertation seeks to uncover people's…

Against the claim of decreased American racism over the past twenty years have come the audit studies. Throughout much of the modern era, a large number of empirically-minded social scientists have pointed out that racism seems by any objective standard to be declining. However, other scholars argue that anonymous tests show considerable…

Although the overall health in the US has improved over the past few decades, Black men, regardless of socioeconomic status or educational attainment, bear a disproportionate burden in disease morbidity and mortality. African-American men remain the most vulnerable racial gender group for almost every health condition that medical researchers…

Young people who graduate from high school, get a job, and get married before having children, in that order, are far less likely to be in poverty and far more likely to have a solid footing in the middle class later in life. This path to adulthood has been dubbed the "success sequence." The cultural norms and values embedded in the…

Dance education in American schools from P-12 through higher education are affected by the pervasive reach of Whiteness. Well-intentioned and passionate dance educators feel the effects of and are instrumental in the institutions Whiteness has reified in the American educational system. In order to dismantle inequity and marginalization of Black…

Since the creation of American higher education, the majority of the nation's colleges have been led, managed, and directed by White men. From the Boards of Trustees to the dean level, racial representation in higher education leadership has traditionally not included people of color. This lack of diversity in senior leadership is juxtaposed…

The article and the following discussion were prompted after the authors' participation in a recent qualitative research conference. In the article, a Black woman and Latina scholar share their experiences and reflections as scholar researchers. As a point of entry, they discuss how even qualitative research communities can be marginalizing spaces…

While women are obtaining more college degrees than men, there still exists an imbalance of women leaders in higher education institutions. The purpose of this qualitative, phenomenological study was to identify how women from different races account for the experiences that have facilitated their ability to access executive level leadership…

With the philanthropic support of the Art for Justice Fund and Michelson 20MM Foundation, the Campaign for College Opportunity produced this research brief that provides an overview of the current state of higher education for currently and formerly incarcerated students. This brief provides descriptive demographics on California's incarcerated…

For decades, social theorists have posited--and descriptive accounts have shown--that students isolated by both social class and ethnicity suffer extreme deprivations that limit the effectiveness of equal-opportunity interventions. Even educational programs that yield positive results for moderately disadvantaged students may not prove beneficial…

Early last year, the American Council on Education (ACE) released a comprehensive volume on the state of race and ethnicity in higher education. Borrowing from the findings of this volume, the authors highlight persistent equity gaps and observations for the field.

According to the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education's (WICHE's) 9th edition of its quadrennial "Knocking at the College Door: Projections of High School Graduates," released in December 2016, the overall number of U.S. high school graduates will plateau, then begin to decline, within the next decade. Further, the high…

Just over fifty years ago, the author began his senior year on the bucolic campus of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. By the time of his graduation in 1969, he had been affiliated with the university for seven years, having studied cello there since the age of fourteen. Yet this familiarity did little to quell the profound alienation that he felt…

This study reviews empirical data from the U.S. Census, American Community Survey (ACS) and academic journals to explore K-12 and higher educational outcomes pertaining to Southeast Asian American (SEAA) males. We argue that the empirical dismissal of SEAA males in social science research reinforces a longstanding agenda of structural neglect and…

Legal decisions about affirmative action in higher education do more than impact how admissions policies are structured. The discourse produced in these decisions structures how race is talked about, understood, and enacted in the context of higher education and beyond. However, critique of affirmative action rhetoric in the legal realm tends to…