Affirmative action in Brazilian universities: Effects on the enrollment of targeted groups

Discussions of U.S. affirmative action policy assume that considering race in undergraduate admissions increases Black and Latinx student enrollments. We show that this assumption that affirmative action is linked to Black and Latinx student enrollments holds true for higher-status colleges and universities, but not institutions across the field of higher education. We use fixed effects modeling to analyze the association between a stated affirmative action admissions policy and enrollment trends for first-year students of different racialized backgrounds between 1990 and 2016 at 1,127 selective institutions. We find that, at the most selective institutions, stated policy usage was associated with increased Black student enrollments. However, at less selective institutions, policy usage was associated with decreased Black student enrollments and increased Non-U.S. resident enrollments. We also identify close-to-zero estimates of this relationship for enrollment trends of additional demographic backgrounds. We use these findings to elaborate the role of field-level status dynamics in racialized organizations theory. Paradoxically, U.S. American higher education’s contemporary racialized status order roughly consists of higher-status institutions that consider race in admissions but do not enroll racially heterogeneous cohorts, middle-status institutions that do not consider race but enroll racially heterogeneous cohorts, and lower-status non-selective institutions that enroll disproportionately high numbers of Black, Indigenous, and Latinx students.

Comparison of Black Student Enrollment in US Schools and Colleges of Pharmacy, Medicine, and Dentistry

The public school system in U.S. has changed dramatically over the past few decades. Institutionally, neo-liberal reform has created a new educational apparatus known as charter schools. As they admit students without school boundaries, these schools promise to offer great opportunities for disadvantaged students. The enrollment in charter schools is mainly Latinx and Black students, especially in large urban areas. That demographic shift is not reflected in the literature because previous studies have predominately focused on comparisons between Whites and minorities. Using Chicago as a case, this study compares the association between the enrollment of Black and Latinx students with educational resources and academic performance in charter schools. Using Illinois Report Card data representing 119 public schools during the 2016 to 2017 academic year, we aimed to understand which group could more systemically benefit from charter schools. We found that although the enrollment of Black students might be associated with better educational resources (i.e., total number of school days per academic year, and class size), the enrollment of Latinx students predicted stronger school academic performance on the SAT and PARCC. Those findings can contribute to the debate about institutionalized racial inequality in education and the effects of charter schools.

The implementation and impact of Affirmative Action policies on female education at Gulu University remain low. Affirmative Action policies are vital in changing the community's perspective on female education in Higher Education. Despite the implementation of the Affirmative Action policies in Gulu University, their impact remained low. This study involved 524 participants using a cross-sectional research design based on mixed methods of qualitative and quantitative approaches. Whereas Affirmative Action had a significant effect on female Education nationally, it was not the case in Gulu University. For instance, more male students are admitted and registered compared to their female counterparts. At graduation, which is the completion and exit point, fewer females graduate compared to males. Records and literature showed that the policy worked for categories of females from specific regions, districts, and schools. The study established that most females who had benefited from Affirmative Action were not from Northern Uganda’s districts and schools. For the past five years, the percentage of female students’ enrolment has ranged between 35.6% to 39.4 %. Furthermore, in the 17th Graduation of Gulu University, 34.5% females graduated compared to 65.5% males. This is an indicator that the affirmative Action policy seems not to equally benefit females in Higher Education. Whereas this is an improvement in the enrolment of female students, their completion rate remains a challenge. This does not synchronise with the African philosophy of contextualising African solutions through the ‘Africa we want’. This study informs policy-making in countries grappling with the challenges of female education in higher institutions of learning

Prior to the 1970s, the enrollment of black students in U.S. medical schools was less than 3%. One-third of these students attended the three historically black medical schools that existed at that time. In 1970, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), representing the nation's medical schools, made a commitment for reaching parity of black medical student enrollment to that of the proportion of blacks in the U.S. population. The goal was that the enrollment of black students should reach 12% of total medical school enrollment. Within four years the enrollment of black students more than doubled to 7.5% by 1974. This greater than 100% enrollment increase was attributed to medical schools’ change in their commitment to affirmative action (Petersdorf, Turner, Nickens, & Ready, 1990; Cohen, Gabriel, & Terrell, 2002).

The interplay between explicit and implicit attitudes toward affirmative action (AA) policies is relevant to applied psychology. Its comprehension helps to improve our capacity to evaluate support for such policies. The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which students’ race, political opinion of affirmative action, and prejudice against minorities influence the relationship between implicit-explicit attitudes toward affirmative action policies. 492 student participants were recruited from a large Brazilian public university about racial quotas in admissions. Implicit and explicit measures of attitude about the admission process were applied, together with measures of political opinion of affirmative action, prejudice against minorities and race. The results show that race has little effect on the difference between implicit and explicit attitudes about the admission process, but that prejudice and political position exert strong effects. Our findings suggest that implicit measures of attitudes should be used when evaluating attitudes on AA.

Affirmative action (AA) policies are among the most effective means for enhancing diversity and equality in the workplace, yet are also often viewed with scorn by the wider public. Fairness-based explanations for this scorn suggest AA policies provide preferential treatment to minorities, violating procedural fairness principles of consistent treatment. In other words, to promote equality in the workplace, effective AA policies promote inequality when selecting employees, and the broader public perceives this to be procedurally unfair. Given this inconsistency underlies negative reactions to AA policies, we argue that better preparing individuals to deal with inconsistencies can mitigate negative reactions to AA policies. Integrating theories from the fairness and cognitive styles literature, we demonstrate across 4 studies how dialectical thinking-a cognitive style associated with accepting inconsistencies in one's environment-increases support for AA policies via procedural fairness perceptions. Specifically, we found support for our propositions across a variety of AA policy types (i.e., strong and weak preference policies) and when conceptualizing dialectical thinking either as an individual difference or as a state that can be primed-including being primed by the framing of the AA policy itself. We discuss theoretical contributions and insights for policy-making at government and organizational levels. (PsycINFO Database Record

Background/Context Although frequently associated with the United States, affirmative action is not a uniquely American social policy. Indeed, 2003 witnessed review and revision of affirmative action policies affecting higher education institutions in both France and the United States. Using critical race theory (CRT) as a theoretical lens, this text compares the affirmative action programs and lawsuits litigated in both nations in 2003 and their impact on the educational and social experiences of people who are racially or culturally non-White. Purpose This article examines and compares affirmative action policies and lawsuits directed at higher education in France and the United States. Faced with similar challenges, controversies, and racial concerns, these courts offered somewhat diverging opinions on the purpose, meaning, and impact that affirmative action policies should have in this millennium. Research Design This article employs legal hermeneutics, a specific form of documentary analysis, to examine affirmative action policies and related court decisions recently issued in both France and the United States. U.S. court decisions such as Gratz v. Bollinger (2003) and affirmative action program self-study reports published by L'institut d'etudes politiques, or Sciences Po, serve as the primary sources for the text. Conclusions The 2003 rulings in both France and the United States provide the legal impetus needed for affirmative action programs to continue. However, none of the court decisions or programs on either side of the Atlantic makes any real attempt to address the larger racial issues that created the need for affirmative action from the start. With the exception of the limited use allowed in affirmative action programs, all forms of diversity in the United States have basically the same value and, accordingly, have virtually the same impact on social arrangements. Likewise, France accepted the CEP (Conventions éducation prioritaire [Priority Convention Education]) program as an affirmative action measure while giving no thought to the need to reform the overall ideology of the nation, which dictates that all citizens are French and no forms of heterogeneity exist. In essence, the affirmative actions programs upheld in these court rulings fail to enforce the equality principles imparted in the French and U.S. constitutions by inhibiting discussion and deconstruction of racial inequalities.

This paper aims to understand which fields of study affirmative action students graduated at the undergraduate level in public universities in Brazil in 2009 and 2010. Public universities began expanding access for underrepresented groups through racial, economic, and social affirmative action policies in 2001. The existing literature on affirmative action policies in Brazil focuses on the impact of affirmative action on the demographic characteristics of the student body, and on students’ performance. Using the Higher Education National Exam database from 2009 and 2010, this paper makes an important contribution to this literature by demonstrating that affirmative action students from public universities tend to graduate in less prestigious fields of study. This is likely to translate into less eminent occupational opportunities and lower earnings in the labor market. Drawing on Reproduction theory, this paper provides evidence that, despite affirmative action policies, education continues to reproduce social inequalities in Brazil.

The current study examines attitudes toward affirmative action. Hypotheses related to self‐interest concerning perceptions of the benefits of affirmative action and hypotheses derived from procedural justice research regarding the structure of policy statements both received support. A survey completed by 387 undergraduate and graduate student participants found greater perception of benefits resulting from affirmative action policies, defined in terms of increased opportunity (concrete benefit) and increased satisfaction (abstract benefit), related to greater support for affirmative action. Policies presented with justification received more support than did policies presented without justification. Ethnicity did not directly affect support for affirmative action; however, ethnicity did affect perceptions of the benefits of affirmative action. Perceptions of the benefits of affirmative action mediated ethnicity effects. Suggestions for increasing support for affirmative action are provided.

IN an article published in this review (Antman & Duncan, 2015), we document how racial identity responds to state affirmative action policy. A coding error was recently brought to our attention that resulted in 0.55% of our sample being misclassified in terms of their African ancestry.1 We regret and apologize for this error. Although the error affected only a tiny percent of the overall sample, the correction changes the conclusion of how individuals with multiracial African ancestry respond to state affirmative action bans, from a negative and statistically significant effect to a positive and statistically significant effect. The corrected table 3 shows the updated results. The coefficients for college-aged individuals with African ancestry reported in table 5 are also now positive, but are no longer statistically significant at conventional levels. Correcting the error does not change the conclusions for individuals with only African ancestry or no African ancestry. None of the Asian ancestry classifications, and thus none of the results for individuals with Asian ancestry (table 4 and the last two columns of table 5), were affected by the coding error. There are no meaningful changes to the summary statistics in table 2 except in the column for those with multiracial black ancestry. The most notable change is the fraction of individuals with multiracial black ancestry who self-identify as black: 49.37% in the original table and 90.86% in the updated table.2 (For further explanation and a complete set of updated results, see Antman & Duncan, 2019.) We continue to find that racial identity responds to state affirmative action policy, albeit with a different conclusion for multiracial blacks, and we are now able to distinguish stronger effects for multiracial individuals with more distant connections to their minority group.This is the original abstract: We link data on racial self-identification with changes in state-level affirmative action policies to ask whether racial self-identification responds to economic incentives. We find that after a state bans affirmative action, multiracial individuals who face an incentive to identify under affirmative action are about 30% less likely to identify with their minority group. In contrast, multiracial individuals who face a disincentive to identify under affirmative action are roughly 20% more likely to identify with their minority group once affirmative action policies are banned.We modify this original abstract as follows: We link data on racial self-identification with changes in state-level affirmative action policies to ask whether racial self-identification responds to economic incentives. We find that after a state bans affirmative action, multiracial individuals who face an incentive to identify under affirmative action are about 2% to 5% more likely to identify with their minority group. In contrast, multiracial individuals who face a disincentive to identify under affirmative action are roughly 20% more likely to identify with their minority group once affirmative action policies are banned.

This article concerns an issue that often remains implicit within the public debate about affirmative action and related race-conscious education policies: What role do contested moral ideals play in the disagreement about affirmative action? As background, the article first outlines what a moral disagreement is and then goes on to examine the roots of the disagreement about affirmative action. A case is made for the importance of illuminating and understanding the moral disagreement about affirmative action to inform the public deliberation about related race-conscious education policies, especially given that affirmative action policies are being challenged once again in the public political arena.

Debate surrounding the concept and goals of affirmative action is growing in the United States and other countries. This article explicates and compares the conceptual tenets of affirmative action as they have been operationalized in the U.S. and South Africa. It critiques the positions on equity and affirmative action stated in South African policy documents and by key government policymakers, university executives, and faculty. It also presents case study data on the relationship between affirmative action and institutional change at four South African universities, identifying emerging paradigms for democracy in that nation's higher education system. INTRODUCTION Much of the development of affirmative action concepts, policies, and programs-along with much of the debate-has been centered in the United States. However, other countries have used this mechanism to redress societal inequities. In South Africa, the transformation from apartheid to democracy has highlighted the roles of institutions of higher education. The development of a critical knowledge base and the preparation of students to assume key professional and policymaking roles in various sectors are central purposes of universities. Unfortunately, the presence of Blacks (Africans, Indians/Asians, and Colored groups) and women of all races and ethnicities in South African universities as students, faculty, and professionals is still limited in various disciplines, faculties, and administrative areas. Herman (1995), for example, reports that 51 out of every thousand in South Africa's White population were enrolled in postsecondary institutions in 1991 compared to 35, 13, and 9 out of every thousand for the Indian/Asian, Colored, and African populations, respectively. The 1996 Green Paper on Higher Education Transformation, one of the South African government's major working policy documents, details staff composition trends showing that Whites and men still hold those positions with the greatest prestige, status, and influence in the nation's academy (National Commission on Higher Education, 1996b). The Green Paper further reveals that in 1993, South Africa's historically White universities (HWUs) produced 83% of all research articles generated by the nation's scholars and 81% of all master's and doctorate graduates. To change these realities, redress or affirmative action has become a salient mechanism. Increasing the percentages of underrepresented groups and women is a primary emphasis of affirmative action in higher education. Other prominent ways to redress inequities and to diversify colleges and universities include: professional development for junior professionals, academic bridge programs for students who are underprepared to engage in university work, and the equitable distribution of financial resources to the historically (Black and) disadvantaged universities (HDIs) that have served the nation's Black populations. Various levels of resistance have been encountered in the implementation of such changes in South Africa. Several reports and pieces of legislation written or passed since the 1994 democratic elections have articulated rationales and ways of ensuring fairness and equity throughout the South African university system. After presenting a brief glimpse of the disparate education provided to South Africans of various racial/ethnic groups during the apartheid era, the present article explicates and compares the conceptual tenets of affirmative action as they have been operationalized in the United States and South African contexts. It also critiques the positions on equity and affirmative action expressed by various South African educational policy documents and government officials. To portray the relationship between affirmative action policy and institutional change in the nation's HWUs and HDIs, this article presents relevant findings from the authors' qualitative study of the history and goals of four South African universities. …

The article examines the preconditions, the main stages and the process of evolution of Affirmative Action in the United States. Affirmative action is a set of laws, policies, guidelines, and administrative practices intended to correct any form of discrimination. These include government-mandated, government-sanctioned and voluntary private programs that tend to focus on access to education and employment, granting special consideration to historically excluded groups based on race, such as African Americans. Affirmative Action idea was developed by American intellectuals, public figures and politicians during the twentieth century. The article also analyzes government documents that have become the basis of a new approach to US policy on racial issues. The idea of Affirmative action policies first emerged from debates over non-discrimination policies in the 1940s and during the Civil Rights Movement. These debates led to federal executive orders requiring nondiscrimination in the employment policies of some government agencies and contractors in the 1940s and onward, and to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which prohibited racial discrimination. So, Affirmative action policy for African Americans in the US arose in the 1960s as a result of the movement of the black people for their rights. To overcome racial problems the United States Government was forced to introduce completely new course which aimed to prohibit discrimination against African Americans. The article analyzes various approaches to Affirmative action towards African Americans. The complexity, controversy and versatility of racial relationships in the United States led to the active scientific and social debate about such a policy. Opponents of Affirmative action argue that these policies amount to reverse discrimination which entails favoring one group over another basing on racial preference rather than achievement, and many believe that the diversity of current American society suggests that affirmative action policies succeeded and are no longer required. In particular, policies adopting racial quotas or gender quotas have been criticized as a form of reverse discrimination. Petrauskas, O. (2018). Affirmative Action Policy Towards African Americans in the US: Historical Retrospective. Mìžnarodnì zv'âzki Ukraïni: naukovì pošuki ì znahìdki – The International relations of Ukraine: scientific searches and findings, 27, 247-272 [in Ukrainian].

Both the universities of Auckland and Otago have had affirmative selection policies for entry into health profession programmes for a number of decades. These policies have been created and strengthened as a result of the leadership and advocacy of Māori leaders, academics and communities. The aims of this paper are to: 1) define affirmative action and outline the rationale for affirmative policies, 2) give examples of how affirmative action policies have been implemented in Aotearoa, and 3) give examples of legal challenges to affirmative action drawing on international experience. Affirmative action policies for health professional programmes are a strategy for improving equity in health through raising the participation of members of population groups that have been historically excluded or under-represented. There are a range of arguments in favour of affirmative policies: constitutional obligations related to Te Tiriti o Waitangi; health professionals from under-represented communities are more likely to serve their communities; they help address biases in healthcare delivery, thereby improving the quality of care; they contribute to health equity through the impact their careers have on the education of others; they are more likely to focus their research on communities they serve and engage with; and their leadership has the potential to benefit the entire system. Legal challenges to affirmative action have been common in some overseas jurisdictions and have resulted in some instances in weaker, or absent, affirmative action policies. We conclude that strong affirmative action policies in tertiary health profession programme admissions contribute to achieving health equity. While much of the literature focusses on admissions to medical programmes, the principles of affirmative action apply equally to all health profession (and other) programmes in Aotearoa.