The Demise of Affirmative Action in College Admissions

Affirmative action in college admissions was effectively banned in Texas by the Hopwood ruling in 1997, by voter referenda in California and Washington in 1996 and 1998, and by administrative decisions in Florida in 1999. The Hopwood and Johnson rulings also had possible applicability to public colleges throughout Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi. The Supreme Court’s 2003 decision in the Grutter and Gratz cases reaffirmed but limited the legal basis for affirmative action in colleges. This article uses nationally representative data on the admissions decisions of high school students in 1992 and 2004 to estimate the magnitude of the change in affirmative action in college admission decisions (i.e., how these policy changes affected the relative likelihood of admission of minority and nonminority applicants). We find substantial declines in levels of affirmative action practiced by highly selective colleges in the states affected by bans and the Hopwood and Johnson rulings, and no evidence of declines outside these states (and thus modest and generally insignificant declines nationwide). We show how the decline in affirmative action in these particular states affects not only students in these states but also those students who live in adjacent states, particularly when the adjacent states lack highly selective colleges.

Affirmative action in college admissions is based on the premise that a diverse student body contributes to interactions among students from different backgrounds, which are in turn positively related to desirable outcomes of college. This study evaluates the merits of this rationale for affirmative action by examining the direct and indirect relationships between student-body diversity and students' gains in understanding people of other racial/ethnic backgrounds. Data from a nationally representative sample of 428 colleges and universities participating in the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) indicated that student-body diversity was indirectly, but not directly, related to gains in understanding people from diverse backgrounds. Results supported the use of affirmative action in college admissions, indicating that student body diversity is directly related to greater interaction among diverse groups, but not the quality of interpersonal relations on campus. Diversity of the student body was indirectly related to gains in understanding diverse groups, acting through informal interactional diversity.

In this dissertation, I develop a framework to investigate the implications of Affirmative Action in college admissions on both study effort choice and college placement outcomes for high school students. I model the college admissions process as a Bayesian game where heterogeneous students compete for seats at colleges and universities of varying prestige. There is an allocation mechanism which maps each student’s achieved test score into a seat at some college. A colorblind mechanism ignores race, while Affirmative Action mechanisms may give preferential treatment to minorities in a variety of ways. The particular form of the mechanism determines how students’ study effort is linked with their payoff, playing a key roll in shaping behavior. I use the model to evaluate the ability of a given college admission policy to promote academic achievement and to minimize racial academic gaps—namely, the achievement gap and the college enrollment gap. On the basis of these criteria, I derive a qualitative comparison of three canonical classes of college admissions policies: color-blind admissions, quotas, and admission preferences. I also perform an empirical policy analysis of Affirmative Action (AA) in US college admissions, using data from 1996 on American colleges, freshman admissions, and entrance test scores to measure actual AA practices in the American college market. Minority college applicants in the United States effectively benefit from a 9% inflation of their SAT scores, as well as a small fixed bonus of approximately 34 SAT points. I also estimate distributions over student heterogeneity

This article examines the attitudes of baccalaureate aspiring community college students with regard to affirmative action in college admissions. Using data from UCLA's Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) Annual Freshman Year Survey, the study assessed determinants of approval or disapproval of affirmative action for 20,339 community college students. Because students in traditionally disadvantaged groups (e.g., first-generation, racial/ethnic minorities, female, and low-income) are overrepresented at the community college, critical theoretical perspectives concerning social mobility and self-interest were utilized to guide the study. The findings indicate that race/ethnicity and political views were significant predictors of affirmative action attitudes for males and females. The impact of family income and transfer intent significantly contributed to male support for abolishing affirmative action. Age yielded a significant association for support of affirmative action as reported by older African American and white students.

Moral intuitions and attitudes towards affirmative action in college admissions

Promoting Educational Opportunities: Long-Run Implications of Affirmative Action in College Admissions

A rancorous debate continues to rage over the use of affirmative action policies in college admissions. This article uses a simple signaling model to evaluate the labor market impacts of four types of affirmative action admissions policies. RacE‐based preferential policies and policies guaranteeing admission based on high school academic rank may induce discrimination in labor markets when there exists strong heterogeneity in socioeconomic disadvantage within the underrepresented minority group. Under such conditions, it may also be difficult to realize ethnic diversity with disadvantagE‐based preferential policies. The article argues instead for affirmative action policies emphasizing intensive college preparation for targeted groups.

Higher education has been historically recognized as the very door to opportunity and success for our nation's youths and future leaders. Following the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, the cry and pressure for access to America's college campuses have intensified, especially along the lines of racial and gender discrimination. The long record of oppression has translated into an intense debate over the feasibility of affirmative action as a viable policy to rectify the past and the present This article will afford a brief overview of the necessity of affirmative action in college admissions as well as an analysis and assessment of this policy from the perspective of Critical Race Theory.

Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions by William G. Bowen and Derek Bok. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. 472 pp. $24.95, cloth. Reviewed by Darren Woodruff, American Institutes for Research, Washington, D.C. aims and values of an educational institution are often revealed most vividly by the choices it makes in selecting its students. With this assertion, the authors of this painstakingly documented and well-written study launch into a fascinating and timely examination of race and the college admissions process and the related academic and career outcomes for Black students admitted into selective colleges and universities. title of the book, Shape of the River, is used by the authors as a metaphor to signify the complex and controversial nature of linking social progress to affirmative action, particularly in the context of increasing access to higher education. data for this study comes from the College and Beyond database, a compilation of records fox more than 80,000 undergraduate students who matriculated at 28 colleges and universities in the fall semesters of 1951, 1976, and 1989. authors, former presidents of Princeton and Harvard universities, respectively, utilize this quantitative data as well as their own considerable experiences in higher education to build a persuasive argument for continuing the use of affirmative action in college admissions. Chapter 1, Historical Context, sets the tone for examining the current debate on race and college admissions. authors site data showing that in 1951, Black students averaged 0.8% of the entering class at the 19 College and Beyond schools for which records were available. From 1960 to 1995, the percentage of college graduates in the overall population of Blacks rose from 5.4% to 15.4%, largely as a result of the civil rights movement and increased attention to past discriminatory practices. Additionally, during this time the Black-White gap in college entrance examination scores declined by approximately 25%. These educational achievements helped lead to the gradual emergence of a Black middle class, with 20% of Blacks in 1990 working at a management or professional level, up from 5% in 1950. Despite such progress and the related benefits to society, however, the authors note that efforts to increase the number of minority professionals through race-sensitive admissions policies have never been fully accepted. They provide a recent example of this tension in the 1996 announcement by the Regents of the University of California that the nine universities in their system would no longer be permitted to take race into account in admitting students. Other states have since followed with their own lawsuits challenging the consideration of race in admission policies. Chapter 2, The Admissions Process and Race-Neutrality, explores how Black enrollment at selective schools would have proceeded under a race-neutral admissions system. chapter begins by demonstrating that the vast majority of undergraduate institutions accepted all qualified candidates, leaving only 20% to 30% of schools in a position to apply more restrictive selection criteria, be it race or any other standard. These more selective institutions are represented by five of the colleges and universities in the College and Beyond database. Bowen and Bok contend that the adoption of a strict race-neutral standard by these schools would have resulted in a 50% to 70% reduction in Black enrollment. Moreover, the enrollment level of Blacks under such a system would have fallen from 7.1% to 2.1% of the entering class. They further conclude that the drop-off in qualified applicants would have stemmed directly from disparities in precollegiate academic achievement, as seen particularly in test scores and high school grades. As they maintain, the academic credentials of the students rejected under the race-neutral premise would have been only slightly weaker than those of the students who would have been admitted. …

Affirmative action is increasingly under attack. 1Some argue that racism is no longer a problem, that compensation for past wrongs is inappropriate, and that the ultimate goal of a color-blind society cannot be reached by means of a racebased policy. 2 Others concede the need for some sort of affirmative-action program but argue for a broader definition of disadvantage, often focusing on socioeconomic status variables other than race or ethnicity.According to this perspective, "class-based" affirmative action is a fairer and more politically palatable means to similar ends. 3Proposals for class-based affirmative-action policies have become particularly important in college admissions in the wake of recent court decisions that suggest that race-based scholarships and admis-1 See Conrad [1996] for a discussion of arguments for and against affirmative action and their application to policy changes in California; Yinger and Yinger [1996] for a critical review of alternative views of affirmative action; Bunzel [1996] for a critique of the use of race in college admissions; and Citrin [1996] on recent attacks on affirmative action and the role of public opinion.2 Recent examples include Bolick [1996], Eastland [1996]; in contrast, see Bergmann [1996].

As a fast-growing population in US. society, Asian Americans, particularly Chinese Americans, have started to engage more actively and amplify their presence in the recent legal challenges to affirmative action in college admissions. In order to get a deeper understanding of how US.-based Chinese view affirmative action, we conducted a textual content analysis informed by Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) to analyze comments on several articles surrounding affirmative action published on a WeChat news outlet, ChineseAmericans. Findings centre around misconceptions of affirmative action driven by different translations of the term from English to Chinese, along with Chinese cultural exceptionalism. This study adds to an emerging body of literature on public perceptions of affirmative action within the Chinese and Chinese immigrant community, whose voices have either been overlooked completely or critiqued as solely pawns in a larger quest to eliminate affirmative action.

Former Ivy League presidents Bowen and Bok tackle the criticisms of affirmative action in college admissions by turning to evidence which shows that, given the opportunity, minority students 1 do as well as or better than their White counterparts at the nation's top universities on a number of educational outcomes. Their findings remind us that affirmative action not only leads to more diverse campuses complete with their educational benefits (Hurtado, et al, 1998), but that individuals also benefit from affirmative action policies that give deserving students an opportunity to accrue the benefits of attending top universities. The timeliness of the book and study is critical as affirmative action policies are threatened or have been eliminated in many states.

Racial segregation has been a persistent feature of the American social landscape and a longstanding contributor to racial inequality, particularly between Blacks and Whites. Affirmative action policies have been used to address the systemic discrimination and attendant socioeconomic consequences to which African Americans have been subjected. Yet affirmative action has not been widely used in all domains in which segregation and systemic discrimination occurred. Although such policies have been adopted in the domains of employment and postsecondary education, few federal affirmative action programs have been used in housing. This is surprising given high levels of segregation across the metropolitan United States, as well as the stated integrative objectives of the U.S. Congress when it passed theFair Housing Act of1968. To understand this puzzle, we use the Gautreaux Assisted Housing Program, a housing mobility effort of the Federal government and the Chicago Housing Authority that used explicit racial criteria, as a surrogate for affirmative action in housing more broadly. We conduct a comparative analysis of Gautreaux and affirmative action in college admissions using insights from applied political philosophy and sociology. By confronting Gautreaux with a more traditional affirmative action program, we are able to identify and compare the judicial, moral, and instrumental justifications for each, enabling us to draw conclusions about whether and how affirmative action can justifiably be used on a large scale to reduce neighborhood segregation, the possible forms it could take, and the difficulties it would face. We close with a discussion of the recent shift toward integration taken by the Department of Housing and Urban Development under the Obama administration, its relationship to affirmative action, and its implications for declines in residential segregation in the United States.

This paper investigates to what extent socioeconomic status (SES)‐based affirmative action in college admissions can produce racial diversity. Using simulation models, we investigate the racial and socioeconomic distribution of students among colleges under the use of race‐ or SES‐based affirmative action policies, or targeted, race‐based recruitment policies. We find, first, that neither SES‐based affirmative action nor race‐targeted recruiting on their own produce levels of racial diversity achieved by race‐based affirmative action. However, the two policies in combination, although likely expensive, may yield racial diversity comparable to race‐based affirmative action. Second, the use of affirmative action policies by some colleges reduces the diversity of similar‐quality colleges without such policies. Third, the combination of SES‐based affirmative action and race recruiting results in fewer academically‐overmatched Black and Hispanic students than under race‐based affirmative action, but the schools that use both also see a reduction in the academic achievement of enrolled students.

Affirmative action is one of the most controversial current public policies—public support has never reached a majority of the electorate for most versions of affirmative action. Many people oppose affirmative action on the grounds that it violates norms of procedural fairness and meritocracy, in spite of the fact that they also support egalitarian values consistent with it. This article explores this apparent paradox by testing reactions to affirmative action in college admissions by comparing three models positing differing roles for values in ideological reasoning: (1) a central role for values—Tetlock's (1986) value pluralism model, (2) a secondary role for values—Lind's (1992) fairness heuristic hypothesis, and (3) no role for values—affective explanations (i.e., Jackman, 1978). Results support the fairness heuristic hypothesis—subjective assessments of fairness play a mediating role between personal values and support for affirmative action. These results indicate that values play a significant role in determining support for affirmative action. To more fully understand how people reason about affirmative action, however, values research must be yoked with justice research.