This report analyzes access through the lens of enrollment for Black residents who are between the ages of 18-24. At The Education Trust, it is believed enrollment is just one component of higher education access, and that retention, completion, and student outcomes should be considered as well. While nearly 74% of the institutions in the sample…

Racisms are plural, taking different forms in different countries, subject to change in focus and intensity over time. Colonialism and slavery influence attitudes and policies in both countries through to modern times. In examining the British and American contexts, one needs to particularise by (a) country, (b) ethnicities, (c) histories, (d)…

Vietnam has achieved near-universal access to compulsory schooling over the past two decades. However, inequalities between ethnic majority and minority students are stark at post-compulsory levels, where progression is selective based on academic criteria and ability to pay. In this article, we adopt a mixed-methods approach to examine quality…

Affirmative action in postsecondary admissions may be the most visible area where the battles over the consideration of race in educational policy and practice have played out in the law. After decades of sustained legal attacks on the efforts of universities to implement policies that disrupt racial inequalities, many in the higher education…

According to the authors of "Higher Education for American Democracy," the role of education in a democratic society "is not merely to meet the demands of the present" but to "serve as an instrument of social transition" (p. 6). A democratic university should be a living model of democracy that could embody the civic…

Finding the right college is a challenge for all students, but Black families face additional challenges and questions when navigating the admissions process. Veteran admissions experts Timothy L. Fields and Shereem Herndon-Brown demystify this complexity by advising families on when to begin the process, where to apply, and how to be a…

This conceptual paper analyzes persistent challenges to racially diversify higher education in Texas, paying special attention to trends at this Southern state's most selective flagship--University of Texas at Austin. We apply critical race theorist Kimberlè Crenshaw's frame of race liberalism and her view of equality as either expansive or…

Affirmative action in college admission is one of the most contested initiatives in contemporary federal policy, from its beginnings in the 1960s through the 2014 lawsuit alleging that Harvard discriminates against Asian American applicants. Supporters point out that using race and ethnicity as a criterion for admission helps remediate some of the…

Bias--both perceived and real--dictates how Asian-Americans view the college admission process. "The Harvard case" is a lawsuit brought by Students for Fair Admissions Inc. (SFFA). The group, led by conservative legal strategist Edward Blum, sued Harvard in 2014, claiming there was evidence proving bias against Asian-American students in…

In this paper, I investigate two clashing perspectives regarding the good of the university: a socioeconomic and an epistemic perspective. I position current writing on the university in the philosophy of education as being largely socio-economic and contrast this view to an earlier tradition of writing about the university that I position as…

Diversity is a ubiquitous concept in Education. Our contemporary racial discourse has been taken over by diversity talk. That is, to talk about race in the colorblind era in the contexts of school admissions or educational policy is to do so through the language of diversity. However, the hegemonic ascendancy of diversity has been dependent on the…

This critical literature review investigates how "diversity" and "equity" are employed in top-cited higher education scholarship published between 2000 and 2015. No analysis to date has offered such a comparative exploration relative to well-recognized racial disparities in higher education. Findings reveal a divergence with…

Affirmative action is a topic that has been a flashpoint amongst policymakers, lawmakers, and the public since President Kennedy introduced the phrase in 1961. Within education, a legal status quo has been in place since the Supreme Court's ruling in "Regents of the University of California v. Bakke" (1978), banning strict racial quotas…

In the wake of the Supreme Court's ban on race-conscious admissions, the pursuit of diversity and equity in higher education is increasingly under threat. While access to higher education has improved overall for historically underrepresented students, the quality of that opportunity remains uneven, particularly along the lines of race/ethnicity…

William Banks' 1984 article "Afro-American Scholars in the University" situated Black faculty at predominantly White institutions in a milieu noting the uses and misuses of Black scholars, constituencies in conflict, the range of responses from Black scholars, and the standards and realities for their advancement in academia. Banks…