Affirmative Action In Higher Education Research Articles

Time to Pivot: A Guide to Holistic Admissions.

As an ever-increasing number of physician assistant (PA) programs moves toward holistic admissions, a better understanding of how to achieve their stated admission goals becomes more important. With the June 2023 US Supreme Court decision effectively ending affirmative action in higher education, navigating holistic admissions is now an even greater challenge. In this article, the PA Education Association's Presidents Commission offers a guide for programs to use in implementing holistic admissions at their institutions and key considerations. Is the process mission-driven? Does it follow principles of quality improvement and incorporate ongoing assessment of that process? Using data can be a constructive and insightful way to inform the process. The authors hope that tools, resources, and recommendations offered in this article will serve as valuable resources for any program attempting to institute or improve its holistic admissions process.

Shifting Tides: The Evolution of Racial Inequality in Higher Education from the 1980s through the 2010s.

Amid the proliferation of state-level bans on race-based affirmative action in higher education, the U.S. Supreme Court's decision on June 29, 2023, dismantled race-conscious college admission policies, intensifying concerns about the persistence and potential increase of racial inequality in higher education. The authors analyze four restricted-use national survey datasets to investigate racial disparities in college attendance outcomes from the 1980s through the 2010s. Although college entrance rates increased for all racial groups, Black and Hispanic youth became increasingly less likely than their White peers to attend four-year selective colleges. In the 2010s cohort, Black and Hispanic youth were 8 and 7 percentage points, respectively, less likely than their White counterparts to secure admission to four-year selective colleges, even after controlling for parents' income, education, and other family background variables. The findings underscore the urgent need for proactive policy interventions to address the widening racial inequality in attending selective postsecondary institutions.

Experiences and Perceptions of Affirmative Action in Higher Education: a Critical Analysis of Dalit and Non-dalit Women in a Central University

Education helps to groom and enhance people’s personalities by inculcating in them a desirable set of knowledge, values, and skills. Higher education makes people specialise in a particular set of knowledge, fields and skills. One of the vital functions of higher education in a society is that it serves the demands of the labour market as it leverages individuals with skills and acts as a ladder to achieve upward social mobility, which enhances one’s status in society, especially for the marginalised sections of the population. Because of its significance in establishing equality among all sections of society, the Indian government implemented an affirmative policy, primarily a reservation for disadvantaged castes. The present research paper aims to understand the experiences and perceptions of Dalit women and non-Dalit women studying in higher education toward affirmative policy. It is an endeavour to analyse the government’s efforts to provide social equality through the means of distributive justice by introducing the policy of protective discrimination. Primary data was collected through qualitative means for which the case study method is used. Twenty-four respondents, twelve Dalit women, and twelve non-Dalit women were selected by a purposive sampling method and analysis was done by coding their responses and applying a narrative analysis technique. Secondary data has been collected and analysed from government reports, newspapers, magazines, articles, etc. to substantiate the data.

APA Speaks Out Against Supreme Court Ruling on Affirmative Action in Higher Education

APA Speaks Out Against Supreme Court Ruling on Affirmative Action in Higher Education

Racial democracy crisis and the emergence of critical race and feminist theories in Brazilian criminology

This article aims to understand the emergence of the academic field of critical studies on racism, and its intersectionality with gender and class in the last three decades, in Brazilian criminology. It identifies the core elements of a specific grammar on epistemological perspectives, academic agendas, and political solutions. At the same time, it points to the participation of new subjects, subjectivities, and relations of academic production and dissemination. It also explores the impact of the post-Durban Conference Era (2001) – the crisis of the ideology of racial democracy – on scientific production on inequality and the negative effects of the criminal justice system. It proposes an explanation for the changes in academic production stemming from the transformations of Brazilian public universities. We claim the importance of this epistemological and methodological renewal to address the inequalities of the criminal justice system: the incorporation of new concepts and perspectives such as genocide, whiteness, epistemicide, intersectionality, and necropolitics; the emphasis on the production of Black intellectuals, historically ignored by the academy, who thematised dimensions of racial violence from their experience and political struggle; the emergence of new research networks throughout Brazil and new profiles of researchers, an effect of racial diversity resulting from affirmative action in higher education; more dialogue between academic research and the demands of social movements; new social movements that actively used the media to confront police and prison violence.

Affirmative action and the choice of schools

Socioeconomic-based affirmative action in higher education has gained importance following controversies over race-based alternatives. In many settings, these interventions use a school-based criterion that selects beneficiaries relative to their peers. Exploiting a nationwide quota policy in Brazil that reserved a large share of vacancies in higher education for public-school students, I show that the reform increases movements from private to public schools by 31% and that movers come disproportionately from low-SES and low-quality private schools. An exploration of the mechanisms shows that movers increase their future probability of higher education attendance at the expense of attending poorer and lower-performing public schools. The reform also leads to changes in school choice of indirectly exposed cohorts and general-equilibrium effects in the form of school closure.

El desafío de la permanencia estudiantil en el contexto de la acción afirmativa: el caso de la Universidad Federal de Bahía

This article analyzes student permanence in the context of affirmative action in higher education, based on the case of Federal University of Bahia. The permanence of students in higher education is an absent theme in the field of research on affirmative action in Brazil. Permanence policy, regarding to student assistance, gained relevance in parallel to the establishment of affirmative action policies in public universities and, in particular, after the enactment of Law 12.711 (BRASIL, 2012). The research was based on documental analysis of actions and programs of the federal government of the national policy of student assistance and UFBA’s institutional documents. Starting with a brief contextualization of affirmative action in Brazil and the emergence of student assistance policies, the research is dedicated to analyzing the case of the Federal University of Bahia, highlighting the institution's affirmative action program and student assistance policies, as well as the students’ socioeconomic profiles. Among the research results, the dimensioning of the impacts of the permanence policy stands out in order to measure the impacts of the permanence policy, therefore contributing to the debate about the importance of student permanence for promotion of social justice.

For Land and Liberty: Black Struggles in Rural Brazil

It is a troubling time to be hopeful about land and labor in Brazil. As Merle Bowen notes in the concluding chapter of For Land and Liberty, the current president, Jair Bolsonaro, and his administration have dismantled environmental protections, opened protected areas to agro-industrial development, and stalled programs that provide access to land for members of Brazil's quilombo communities. Gains from conditional cash transfer programs and the rewriting of public school curriculuma are being reversed, eroded, or eviscerated. Other attacks on the lives and livelihoods of Black and Brown persons in Brazil include assassinations of environmental activists, attempts to revoke affirmative action in higher education, and the undermining of public health efforts to address COVID-19, which has disproportionately affected Indigenous and other minorities.Bowen spent fifteen years examining the ways structural racism operates in rural areas of Brazil, where access to land and labor continues to be one of the most pressing issues. Residents of Black rural communities are corralled by a “highly concentrated and racialized system of landownership” (212). The slow and highly contentious land reform process competes with agro-industrial interests, logging and mining companies, grileiros (people who claim ownership with fabricated deeds), and environmental protection projects, resulting in forced relocation, dispossession, and shifts in the nature, extent, and types of labor available.Bowen assembled information from a vast array of sources and stakeholders including anthropologists, government ministers, landowners, and Afro-Brazilian activists, as well as archives, primary and secondary publications, and ethnographic data. She provides a detailed, close-up view of what this looks like “on the ground” for twelve Black rural communities in two very different regions: Bahia (in the northeast) and the interior of São Paulo. This attention to regional differences is an important complement to the scholarly literature, as it provides a deeper understanding of the history, local conditions, demographics, crops, instability of wage labor, and the gendered nature of labor, disrupting the tendency to homogenize or romanticize the struggles that quilombolas face.Chapter 2 traces the history, heterogeneity, and shifting agendas of Black activists and the efforts that led to the insertion of a land reform initiative in the 1988 Constitution (Article 68), which guaranteed permanent collective ownership to federally recognized Maroon communities (also called remanescentes de quilombos or quilombo remnant communities). There are an estimated four thousand quilombo communities in both urban and rural areas in Brazil. The communities Bowen focuses on are representative of those still waiting for a land title. The titling process is long and complicated, and until they receive a land title, residents of traditional Black communities are under constant threat of expulsion or relocation. Petitions for land titles have generated charges of reverse racism and violence from those who refuse to accept the legitimacy of quilombola rights to territory. Since 1988, receiving a title has been the exception rather than the rule.Bowen's research provides a fine-grained assessment of the challenges in applying Article 68, including operationalizing “who” is a quilombola, and how shifting jurisdictional procedures, state laws favoring titling, and market forces have impacted the daily lives of rural quilombolas (Chapters 2 and 3). The anchor or signature of identity for those in Black rural communities is “rootedness” to the land they occupy, drawn from an intergenerational accumulation of agroecological knowledge and practices, a distinction from urban communities that do not rely on the land for their livelihood (Chapter 4).In Chapter 5, Bowen turns to the “commodification of Quilombola culture” as a revenue strategy and a chance for “self-determination and self-making” (182). There has been less investment in quilombo tourism than in tourism along coastal beach areas, ecotourism in the Amazon region, or pro-poor/reality tourism in urban shantytowns. Despite the lack of evidence, assertions are made about the potential positive impact of tourism in quilombos through job creation. Although there is little research on tourism in quilombos, some suggest that it presents a simplified and incomplete rendering of the past (and present) by focusing only on African cultural retentions while obscuring the knowledge, experiences, and skills of enslaved workers in a nation that was built on their labor. Success is more evident when quilombolas set the terms for what to showcase and have a major stake in ownership and representation. Unfortunately, conflict with tourist agencies' agendas and other imbalances in the quilombo tourism industry have reinforced racial, class, and gendered disparities, and do little to reduce poverty.Scholars of Latin American studies, Africana studies, history, geography, anthropology, and agrarian studies will get an extensive overview of the regional complexities in applying a land reform program, including what was promised and what has failed to deliver. It is not altogether a grim portrait; but the long-term benefits of these policies in transforming the livelihoods of those in Black rural communities remain contingent on access to labor as well as a land title.

Bakke Redux - Affirmative Action and Physician Diversity in Peril.

This article examines the legal arguments that may lead the Supreme Court to overrule precedent and strike down affirmative action in university admissions. Given the critical importance of a diverse physician workforce for our Nation's health care system, the potential reversal of affirmative action admission programs in medical schools may have severe negative consequences. This article discusses the implications for health care should the Court issue an opinion restricting or eliminating affirmative action in higher education.

Reckoning with Asian America and the New Culture War on Affirmative Action*

The latest battle over affirmative action in university admissions may soon reach the U.S. Supreme Court, and a ruling in the plaintiff’s favor will end affirmative action in higher education across the nation. Asian Americans have taken center stage in this new culture war, fueled by the reigning narrative that they are victims of the policy who are unjustly penalized because of their race in spite of their competence. Opponents of affirmative action have effectively wielded competence—and more specifically hyper‐competence—to mark moral deservingness as they push to retreat from race in the name of merit. The onset of Covid‐19, however, has laid bare this impossibility for Asian Americans as the surge of hate incidents has affected one in eight Asian American adults in 2020, underscoring that presumed competence is no shield from xenophobia, and moral deservingness is no protection from anti‐Asian hate. This project highlights how U.S. immigration law, science, and medicine do more than reflect social constructions of race, merit, and moral deservingness; they also produce and reproduce them. I close by arguing that reckoning with Asian America enables us to dismantle the tropes that propel the latest culture war on affirmative action, equips us to rewrite narratives about merit and moral deservingness, and invites us to re‐imagine the linked fate and linked futures of Asian Americans and other minoritized groups.

Attitudes about Affirmative Action in Higher Education Admissions

ABSTRACT Affirmative action is any policy or program that provides special consideration to historically excluded groups, like racial minorities. Affirmative action in higher education is largely understood as being synonymous with the explicit consideration of college applicants’ race. However, colleges can also give special consideration to racial minorities through the consideration of non-race explicit factors, such as first-generation status or removing legacy admissions. In this work, I use a survey experiment to assess US attitudes toward race explicit and non-race explicit admission factors. I find that regardless of racial identity, parents in the US tend to view colleges that consider ascribed characteristics such as race and legacy status less favorably than colleges that do not consider these characteristics. Colleges may be able to use non-race explicit factors to give consideration to the inclusion of racial minorities with more support from the general public.

Can Greentree University Adopt Holistic Admissions Practices and Still Maintain Status as an Elite Institution?

Despite legal challenges, universities are increasingly using holistic admissions practices to accomplish affirmative action and increased student diversity. The admissions committee of the college of nursing at an elite university grapples with the potential outcomes of adopting a holistic admissions process. The case offers the legal and theoretical contexts surrounding affirmative action in higher education. The reader is prompted to consider the value of diversity in the university setting, and the legal and ethical perspectives surrounding admissions practices.

Affirmative Inaction: A Quantitative Analysis of Progress Toward “Critical Mass” in U.S. Legal Education

Since 1978, the Supreme Court has recognized diversity as a compelling government interest to uphold the use of affirmative action in higher education. Yet the constitutionality of the practice has been challenged many times. In Grutter v. Bollinger, for example, the Court denied its use in perpetuity and suggested a twenty-five-year time limit for its application in law school admissions. Almost two decades have passed, so where do we stand? This Note’s quantitative analysis of the matriculation of and degrees awarded to Black and Latinx students at twenty-nine accredited law schools across the United States illuminates a stark lack of progress toward critical mass since Grutter and reveals the continued need for affirmative action in law school admissions.

Imperialistic reclamation of higher education diversity initiatives through semantic co-option and concession

ABSTRACT Affirmative Action in higher education exemplifies interest convergence, and beyond this, interest divergence and imperialistic reclamation. Diversity initiatives, such as the Inclusive Excellence initiative, have adopted key strategies and reasoning developed in Affirmative Action Supreme Court cases. This paper shows how semantic concessions and co-options within Supreme Court cases and in Inclusive Excellence scholarship have moved the focus of higher education diversity programs from access for Students of Color to educational benefits for white students. I show how current diversity initiatives are based on false premises with legal precedent. I frame these semantic concessions and co-options within imperialistic reclamation and discuss the implications.

A solution to multiple problems: the origins of affirmative action in higher education around the world

ABSTRACT How and when does affirmative action emerge in different national contexts? This paper is the first to analyze the emergence of affirmative action in higher education across national contexts. We find that three distinct clusters of affirmative action policies developed historically: (1) early nation-building projects, (2) mechanisms to attenuate social inequality in response to identity-based social movements, and (3) twenty-first century ‘indirect’ affirmative action policies. These clusters differ not only in the goals of their affirmative action policies, but also in how those policies are implemented, and the circumstances under which they emerge, as we show. The findings suggest that once provisions for underrepresented groups becomes part of the repertoire of actions universities or countries can take to solve a variety of national and university problems, affirmative action develops as a means to further a variety of organizational and national goals.

Quota-Based Affirmative Action in Higher Education: Impact on Other Backward Classes in India

While quota-based and other affirmative actions remain on the policy radar of nations faced with social inequalities, there is limited evidence informing policy choices at the national level. This paper estimates the mid-term impact of quota-based affirmative action in higher education (HE) in India implemented from 2008, which mandates that 27 per cent of seats are to be reserved for the Other Backward Classes (OBC) in public funded institutions of HE. Exploiting the differences in participation across social groups, age cohort,s and geographies with varied histories of affirmative action, our triple difference method estimates the impact of the Act by the year 2011–2012. Our results indicate that southern and northcentral states that already had quotas in place for a fairly long period of time, do not contribute much in further expansion of enrolment of OBCs; instead, the eastern region, where such a policy did not exist for long has about 0.12 points improvement in enrolment. Our estimates are robust to different specifications and the impact seems to be non-existent amongst the richest. It suggests that future policy initiatives need to be more nuanced considering regional differences in policy histories, supply of institutions, and extant rates of HE participation of the disadvantaged sections.

Race, Politics, and Education in Brazil: Affirmative Action in Higher Education ‐ by Johnson III, Ollie A. and Heringer, Rosana

Race, Politics, and Education in Brazil: Affirmative Action in Higher Education ‐ by Johnson III, Ollie A. and Heringer, Rosana

Opposing Affirmative Action: The Social Psychology of Political Ideology and Racial Attitudes

Affirmative action in higher education has been a contentious issue for almost forty years. Since about 1970, litigants have challenged such programs in undergraduate and professional schools. The problem is that the attack on affirmative action from the political Right has been shown, in social-psychological literature, to be predicted by racial attitudes. To elucidate this point, this Essay provides a backdrop to understanding racial attitudes among political conservatives in Part I. Part II contends that the way to think about racial bias on the political Right is at the automatic, implicit, and subconscious level. In doing so, Part II provides a framework for understanding implicit biases and how they originate. Part III discusses how implicit bias relates to political ideology. Part IV ties implicit racial attitudes to attitudes about affirmative action, specifically. This Essay concludes by underscoring that while the legal arguments made for why affirmative action in higher education should be held unlawful, based on constitutional ideals, what lies at the heart of the opposition is less about constitutional principles. Rather, the opposition emerges from racial hostility.

Impact of Affirmative Action in Higher Education for the Other Backward Classes in India

This paper measures the impact of quota-based affirmative action in higher education (HE) in India for Other Backward Classes (OBC), implemented from 2008. Since the immediate impact would be felt by OBCs who were eligible to go to college at the time of the implementation, we compare the differences in participation in HE by the younger (18-23 years) and the older (24-29 years) age groups within eligible OBCs, with similar differences in the general caste population. The same double difference is also compared across states with different histories of affirmative action to ascertain if there are regional variations in the impact of the policy, with the expectation that the impact would be higher in regions with no history of affirmative action. Our results from the Difference in Difference (DD) estimates based on National Sample Survey data for 2011-12 do not show a positive impact of the policy on the participation of OBCs. In fact, the impact seems to be negative in all regions, though statistically insignificant, except the East which lacks the long history of affirmative action. A comparison of the East without a long history of affirmative action with the South having a long history of such policy, using triple difference method, produces positive treatment effects, but the estimate loses statistical significance once we control for observable covariates. Our results suggest that the generalized nation-wide policy of this kind may not be relevant for issues which are more regional in nature.

Clarence Thomas, Fisher v. University of Texas, and the Future of Affirmative Action in Higher Education

This article originated as a paper for an affirmative action symposium at the University of Chicago Law School sponsored by the Midwest Black Law Students Association. The article places Justice Thomas’s concurring opinion in Fisher v. University of Texas (“Fisher I”) in the larger context of his voluminous writings on race in general and affirmative action in particular. The article also discusses the commentary on Justice Thomas’s Fisher I opinion because the reaction to what he writes, especially on matters of race, is almost as important as the opinions themselves. The article concludes with some brief comments on Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, a 2014 case about the constitutionality of a 2006 amendment to the Michigan state constitution banning racial preferences in Michigan, and on Fisher v. University of Texas (“Fisher II”), which the Court will be deciding by the end of June 2016. Justice Scalia’s recent death figures prominently in the concluding section.