Once again, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide on the contentious issue of Affirmative Action, and specifically the use of race in admissions decisions in public universities. Despite differences in the details, seasoned veterans of affirmative action debates are experiencing déjà vu. In this case, Abigail Noel Fisher claims overt racial…

Broad inferences have been made that the election of a Black American President indicates that America now functions in a post-racist society. This optimism has fueled a major discussion for changes in American policies which directly affect minorities; in particular, those related to affirmative action in higher education are under attack. Due to…

It has been a long, litigious road from Heman Sweatt, an African-American mail carrier who wanted to attend the prestigious, all-White law school at the University of Texas at Austin in 1946, to Abigail Fisher, a White high school student who failed to win undergraduate admission to the same university a half-century later. Depending on what the…

This study investigated the relevance of participants' social group differences with regard to the processes and outcomes of community dialogues on affirmative action. We found that participants' professional status was most salient to both the quantity of participants' contributions as well as their persuasiveness within the dialogues, with…

Today, almost a century after gaining access to the country's most prestigious secondary schools, determining the academic achievement of African Trinidadian students remains a challenge as neither Trinidad and Tobago's Ministry of Education nor the Caribbean Examination Council, the regional agency responsible for administering standardized…

Diversity today is considered central to the capacity of postsecondary institutions to thrive in an increasingly multiracial and multiethnic society. However, as universities take steps to reap the educational benefits of racial and ethnic diversity, legal decisions and state laws increasingly restrict the tools these institutions have…

he critical race counterstory in this essay takes on the form of allegory to raise awareness about Arizona's anti-immigrant/Mexican climate, and pays particular attention to legislation targeted at Tucson Unified School District's Mexican American studies (also RAZA studies) program.

The use of affirmative action admissions practices in U.S. colleges and universities has been a source of contentious public debate and legal battles since the policy's inception in the 1960s. The legal challenges to race-conscious admissions will continue for the foreseeable future, including renewed court scrutiny on specific universities'…

In a symposium at the 2012 National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education annual conference, Claremont Graduate University Professor Daryl G. Smith, a pioneer in the study of diversity in postsecondary educational contexts, critiqued the disproportionate framing of diversity-related research around past, present, and future U.S.…

This study was carried out to determine the impact of affirmative action policy on the quality service delivery in the public service sector of Kenya. The study was carried out on the premise that there is a relationship between affirmative Action implementation and the quality of service delivery in the public service sector of Kenya. A lot of…

In this article, readers are asked to suspend conventional notions of affirmative action as a policy that ensures equitable admissions practices to the nation's most elite post secondary institutions, and instead to consider how affirmative action might be understood as a way to challenge the relations of power that govern the legitimation of…

In 2012 Spain inaugurated a reform of its higher education financial aid system inspired by three principles: cost-sharing, increasing academic performance and school efficiency. This reform has shifted the aim of the system from equality of access to a type of meritocracy that can be defined as class-biased, as it is only applied to low-income…

We investigate the efficacy and equity of college admissions criteria by estimating the effect of multiple measures of college readiness on college performance in the context of race-blind automatic admissions policies. We take advantage of a unique institutional feature of the Texas higher education system to control for selection into…

Background: Prevailing perceptions of Asian Americans as model minorities have long situated this population within postracial discourse, an assumption that highlights their educational success as evidence of the declining significance of race and racism, placing them as models of success for other people of color. Despite evidence to repudiate…

This exploratory study examined white undergraduate students' (a) racial attitudes towards Asian Americans, (b) principled policy attitudes toward affirmative action, and (c) self-interest in relation to their support for college-based affirmative action policies for Asian Americans at a Midwestern university. A sample (n = 264, 28% male, 72%…