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…

Despite efforts to redress racial grievances, American's most progressive institutional sector, higher education, suffers racial incidents with disturbing frequency. We hypothesize that one explanation lies in the bureaucratization of higher education. Various trends have led to what Benjamin Ginsberg calls "the fall of the faculty" and…

In November of 1996, California voted and approved Proposition 209 (also known as the California Civil Rights Initiative) by a tally of 54.55% to 45.45%. It is unknown how many of those voters voted for the initiative because the name implied that it was pro-civil rights. Nonetheless, California became the first state to ban the practice of…

Education is the value proposition that provides individuals the opportunity to become meaningful contributors to society, their community, and their immediate families. It is the calling card of personal achievement and individual intrinsic benefits. Education is about access and opportunity. Institutions continue to navigate strategies of access…

This paper examines educational segregation in the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro through the lens of a multifaceted centreperiphery relationship involving geographical, racial and historical dimensions. The paper first situates Brazilian racial inequalities historically, drawing on decolonial theory, before examining student enrolment patterns…

This article uses philosophical analysis to clarify the arguments and claims about racial discrimination brought forward in the recent legal challenges to affirmative action in higher education admissions. Affirmative action opponents have argued that elite institutions of higher education are using negative action against Asian American…

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 paper simulates a system of socioeconomic status (SES)-based affirmative action in college admissions and examines the extent to which it can produce racial diversity in selective colleges. Using simulation models, we investigate the potential relative effects of race- and/or SES-based affirmative action policies, alongside targeted,…

Race-based affirmative action policies are widespread in higher education. Despite the prevalence of these policies, there is little consensus on how affirmative action policies affect students either before they reach college or after they matriculate into college. This study provides new evidence on the benefits of affirmative action policies…

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…

As the Chinese mainland has transitioned from elite to mass higher education, the race to attend university has escalated to become a race to attend selective universities. This study focuses on rural female university students and explores how they make sense of their higher education admission experiences. We rationalize that the inquiry into…

We use the Critical Race Theory frameworks of interest convergence and divergence to critique the anti-affirmative action movement's co-option of Asian Americans. Past discussions of affirmative action and Asian Americans mainly concentrate on how Asian Americans are affected by affirmative action, whether positively or negatively. We demonstrate…

Using detailed data on the 2008 graduating class from an elite engineering institution in India, we evaluate the impact of affirmative action policies in higher education focusing on three issues: targeting, catch up, and mismatch. We find that admission preferences effectively target minority students who are poorer than average displaced…

The admissions process used today in America's most selective colleges and universities is a classic case of interest group politics gone awry. Nobody champions or fights for smart, low-income students. The result is an admissions process reduced to a series of "preferences." Taken together with other widely-used admissions practices,…

This dissertation illustrates how admission policies shape access to postsecondary education. Evidence comes from two sectors, each with a distinct type of admission system: highly selective institutions that practice holistic admission (chapters 2 and 3) and less selective public four-year colleges that use admission thresholds (chapter 4). The…