Race-based Affirmative Action Research Articles

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.

Making Sense of Race-Based Affirmative Action in Allocating Scarce Medical Resources in advance

Making Sense of Race-Based Affirmative Action in Allocating Scarce Medical Resources in advance

Affirmative Action and Equality of Opportunity in College Admissions

This essay critically examines the efficacy of race-based affirmative action in U.S. college admissions, arguing that it fails to adequately address the root causes of racial inequality and often does not benefit the most marginalized individuals within minority groups. By exploring affirmative action through the lens of political philosophy, particularly John Rawls' conception of social justice, the essay contends that a focus on socioeconomic status rather than race would more effectively promote equality of opportunity and align with Rawlsian principles. The analysis draws on various studies and theoretical perspectives to highlight the limitations of race-based affirmative action, including its tendency to benefit economically advantaged members of minority groups and its inadequacy in addressing the diverse and complex backgrounds of individuals within these groups. The essay proposes socioeconomic affirmative action as a more equitable alternative, supported by empirical evidence suggesting that such an approach could increase both socioeconomic and racial diversity in higher education institutions. The conclusion underscores the need for systemic reforms beyond admissions policies to truly achieve a just and equitable society.

The Political Economy of Poverty Reduction in Malaysia

This article critically examines regional differences in poverty reduction in Malaysia with a focus on political economy factors. More specifically, we focus on the East–West regional divide in income poverty, between four historically poorer the West Malaysia and two states of Eastern Malaysia–Sabah and Sarawak during 1970–2019. Between 1970 and 1990, Malaysia implemented the New Economic Policy (NEP), arguably the longest and most ambitious race-based affirmative action programme in the world. In this context, we also assess whether and how its affirmative action policies succeeded in closing regional gaps. During the NEP, Sarawak saw greater and earlier reductions in income poverty and inequality than the resource-rich states of Sabah and Terengganu, where poverty largely persisted. We argue that politics played a key role in explaining Sabah’s different trajectory vis-à-vis Sarawak, Perlis, Kedah, Kelantan and Terengganu. The ethnicity-targeted policies of the NEP meant the Malays and Muslims were given priority over all other groups. The faster decline in poverty in Sarawak coincided with Muslim control since 1970. On the other hand, when Sabah was under the non-Muslim rule, there was little progress on poverty alleviation. The situation reversed when Sabah fell under Muslim control. The key lesson is that politics do matter during the implementation phase of poverty alleviation programme in Malaysia.

Affirmative action and its race-neutral alternatives

As affirmative action loses political feasibility, many universities have implemented race-neutral alternatives like top percent policies and holistic review to increase enrollment among disadvantaged students. I study these policies’ application, admission, and enrollment effects using University of California administrative data. UC’s affirmative action and top percent policies increased underrepresented minority (URM) enrollment by over 20 percent and less than 4 percent, respectively. Holistic review increases implementing campuses’ URM enrollment by about 7 percent. Top percent policies and holistic review have negligible effects on lower-income enrollment, while race-based affirmative action modestly increased enrollment among very low-income students. These findings highlight that the most common race-neutral alternatives to affirmative action increase Black and Hispanic enrollment far less than affirmative action itself and reveal that none of these policies substantially affect universities’ socioeconomic composition.

Integrating identity in policy design theory

Extant literature highlights how socially constructed target populations shape the distribution of benefits and burdens, focusing on political elites. In this article, we examined how linked fate, intersectionality and identity complexity shape the impacts of socially constructed target populations on public support for affirmative action in the US. In our nationally representative survey experiment, we randomly assigned respondents to evaluate either a socioeconomic or race-based affirmative action policy and tested the influence of linked fate and partisanship on policy support. First, we found support for our linked fate hypothesis – low-income and non-White respondents were more likely to support socioeconomic or race-based affirmative action, respectively. We also found that the intersectionality of identities – sex, income and race – predicted support for race-based and socioeconomic-based affirmative action. Second, we found that partisanship moderated the effect of linked fate. When interacted with Republican Party identification, the effect of linked fate on support for affirmative action among low-income and racially minoritised respondents disappeared. These findings demonstrate the importance of integrating social identity theory and intersectionality in policy design theory. In this way the article makes a clear contribution to the scholarship on policy design studies.

Race-based affirmative action in Malaysia: Misrecognised subjectivities, enduring inequalities

Malaysia's race-based affirmative action is often studied within the objective domain of resource deficit and distribution. In this paper, I focus on the subjective domain to interrogate how the racial identity modes of Bumiputera Malay youths shape their social attitudes towards affirmative action in Malaysia. Drawing on in-depth interviews, I posit three racial identity modes that correspond to three social attitudes towards affirmative action. The findings point to the disjuncture between Malay subjectivities and their colonial construction; the contestations over affirmative action that go beyond redistribution to recognition; and the neglect of intersectionality in conceptualising Bumiputera disadvantages. I argue that affirmative action can be better understood by incorporating non-elite perspectives, featuring different sites, scales and actors in the reproduction of subjectivities; the politics of affirmative action has to be reconstituted as struggles for recognition and redistribution; and the intersectional disadvantages of Bumiputeras must be foregrounded in the reclaiming of this policy agenda in Malaysia.

Affirmative Action, Mismatch, and Economic Mobility after California’s Proposition 209

Abstract Proposition 209 banned race-based affirmative action at California public universities in 1998. Using a difference-in-differences research design and a newly constructed longitudinal database linking all 1994–2002 University of California applicants to their educational experiences and wages, I show that ending affirmative action caused underrepresented minority (URM) freshman applicants to cascade into lower-quality colleges. The “mismatch hypothesis” implies that this cascade would provide net educational benefits to URM applicants, but their degree attainment declined overall and in STEM fields, especially among less academically qualified applicants. URM applicants’ average wages in their twenties and thirties subsequently declined, driven by declines among Hispanic applicants. These declines are not explained by URM students' performance or persistence in STEM course sequences, which were unchanged after Prop 209. Ending affirmative action also deterred thousands of qualified URM students from applying to any UC campus. Complementary regression discontinuity and institutional value-added analyses suggest that affirmative action’s net educational and wage benefits for URM applicants exceed its net costs for on-the-margin white and Asian applicants.

Centering Whiteness and Entrenching the Myth of Race-Neutral Alternatives to Affirmative Action

In recent decades, White plaintiffs have begun pushing back against schools’ attempts to rectify abysmal levels of campus diversity through race-based affirmative action policies. Students who did not stand to benefit from affirmative action began to seek legal relief against schools implementing such policies, alleging that race-based affirmative action violated federal constitutional rights to equal protection. In addressing these disputes, courts have required schools to first consider race-neutral alternatives to race-based admissions policies to achieve their diversity goals—in recent years, the standard has evolved into a requirement that no workable race-neutral alternative exist for a school to maintain a race-based affirmative action program. Such a requirement appears inconsistent with the overall goals of race-based affirmative action plans—how can a school which hopes to increase racial diversity achieve such diversity through non-racial means? In this Comment, I argue that the current jurisprudence on affirmative action in institutions of higher education rests on the continued centering of Whiteness, ultimately creating a doctrine which attempts to achieve a “painless” solution to racial injustice through prioritizing the need to ensure no race-neutral alternatives exist. Ultimately, this “painless” cure places a substantial roadblock on the path to true racial equity in higher education. By White centering, I refer to the ways in which Whiteness is prioritized and acts as the focal point for any discussion of diversity and racial equity—and, in this instance, affirmative action—with non-White interests fashioned as a lesser priority.

Brown’s Lost Promise: Segregation & Affirmative Action In New York City Specialized High Schools

Race-conscious affirmative action faces its stiffest constitutional threat to date. Justice Powell’s “diversity” rationale, articulated in a solo concurrence in Regents of California v. Bakke, has provided the constitutional peg by which race-conscious affirmative action programs have withstood strict scrutiny for over 40 years. But, to opponents of race-based affirmative action,3 policies that ameliorate historic discrimination are nothing more than a “naked racial-spoils system.” These opponents maintain their support, however, for class-based affirmative action—those programs that provide “help for the poor and disadvantaged.” As Chief Justice Roberts once wrote, “[t]he way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”6 Given the Court’s increasingly conservative composition during the Trump administration, it appears that the Court may soon come to disfavor the diversity rationale. The Court may soon review a First Circuit decision relying on the diversity rationale to uphold the constitutionality of Harvard’s affirmative action program, and it seems likely that the Court’s newest members will side against the university—and race-conscious affirmative action—in that case. Using the case study of Christa McAuliffe Intermediate School PTO, Inc. v. de Blasio, a lawsuit challenging New York City’s class-based policies to diversify its elite Specialized High Schools, this Essay explains that purported support for class-based affirmative action serves as a rhetorical smokescreen for eliminating Brown v. Board of Education’s promise of a racially integrated society. This Essay contends that it is not the ameliorative programs’ race- or class-based means that elicits conservative disapproval, but rather the communities that ultimately stand to benefit from the programs.

The Structure of Strict Scrutiny Review

In Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, Justice Thomas criticized existing Supreme Court doctrine regarding the “tiers of scrutiny,” quoting a passage from an earlier Justice Scalia dissent that the “three basic tiers – ‘rational basis,’ intermediate, and strict scrutiny – ‘are no more scientific than their names suggests, and a further element of randomness is added by the fact that it is largely up to us which test will be applied in each case.’” 136 S. Ct. 2292, 2327 (2016), quoting United States v. Virginia, 518 U.S. 515, 567 (1996) (Scalia, J., dissenting). Justice Thomas added, “But the problem now goes beyond that. If our recent cases illustrate anything, it is how easily the Court tinkers with levels of scrutiny to achieve its desired result. . . . [M]ore recent decisions reflect the Court’s tendency to relax purportedly higher standards of review for less-preferred rights. . . . Meanwhile, the Court selectively applies rational-basis review – under which the question is supposed to be whether ‘any state of facts reasonably may be conceived to justify’ the law – with formidable toughness.” Id., quoting McGowen v. Maryland, 366 U.S. 420, 426 (1961). Despite these concerns, careful attention to the Court’s decisions reveals a predictable and principled structure to the Court’s existing standards of review. Justice Thomas’ criticisms stated in points and above on the “scientific nature” of the standards of review and possible selective application of “rational basis review” are addressed in a separate article entitled, “The Structure of Rational Basis and Reasonableness Review.” Justice Thomas’ criticism in point about the malleability in selecting which standard of review to adopt is addressed in a separate article entitled, “Justifying the Supreme Court’s Standards of Review.” Justice Thomas’ criticism in point regarding selective application of the “higher standards of review” are addressed into two related articles, “The Structure of Intermediate Review” and “The Structure of Strict Scrutiny Review.” All four of these articles are now posted on SSRN and available at http://libguides.stcl.edu/kelsomaterials. This article addresses “The Structure of Strict Scrutiny Review.” Today, there are two versions of strict scrutiny review. There is: (1) “standard” strict scrutiny review used for cases like (a) racial discrimination under the Equal Protection Clause, both in cases involving (i) discrimination against minorities, as in Loving v. Virginia, or in cases of involving (ii) race-based affirmative action, in cases like City of Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co., or (b) content-based regulations of speech in a public forum, in cases like Simon & Schuster, Inc. v. Members of the New York State Crime Victims Board. There is also (2) a “loose” strict scrutiny approach used for cases involving racial redistricting challenges under the Equal Protection Clause in cases like Bush v. Vera. In actual Court decisions, four other kinds of tests have been used, or suggested, by the Court where one of the established versions of strict scrutiny should apply. These four can be viewed as “mutations” of the two kinds of strict scrutiny review proper to apply. These four mutations involve: (1) a “hybrid” kind of intermediate/strict scrutiny review used in cases like Denver Area Educational Telecommunications Consortium v. FCC, which involved regulation of cable television; (2) a “watered-down” kind of strict scrutiny, applied in cases like Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin; (3) suggestion of “extremely limited” possibilities for compelling interests to satisfy strict scrutiny, as in Justice Thomas’ concurrence in Grutter v. Bollinger, a case involving race discrimination under the Equal Protection Clause; and (4) suggestion of a “categorical” approach of unconstitutionally when traditionally strict scrutiny has been applied, such as in Iancu v. Brunetti, a case involving viewpoint discrimination in free speech cases. Part II of this article will discuss the two well-established kinds of strict scrutiny. This discussion will provide detailed treatment of a structured approach to phrasing and applying these two kinds of strict scrutiny tests. Following this discussion, Part III will discuss: (1) the “hybrid” kind of strict scrutiny review. Part IV will address (2) the “watered-down” kind of strict scrutiny review. Part V will discuss (3) the “extremely limited” compelling governmental interests kind of strict scrutiny review. Part VI will discuss (4) adopting a “categorical” approach rather than applying strict scrutiny. Part VII will discuss why the first of these mutated approaches should adopt the loose strict scrutiny of Bush v. Vera, while the last three of these mutations should adopt standard strict scrutiny review. Part VIII will provide a brief conclusion.

Affirmative Action, Major Choice, and Long-Run Impacts

Proposition 209 banned race-based affirmative action at California public universities in 1998. This study analyzes Prop 209's impact on student outcomes using a difference-in-difference research design and a newly-constructed longitudinal database linking all 1994-2002 University of California applicants to their college enrollment, course performance, major choice, degree attainment, and wages into their mid-30s. Ending affirmative action caused UC's 10,000 annual underrepresented minority (URM) freshman applicants to cascade into lower-quality public and private universities. URM applicants' undergraduate and graduate degree attainment declined overall and in STEM fields, especially among lower-testing applicants. As a result, the average URM UC applicant's wages declined by 5 percent annually between ages 24 and 34, almost wholly driven by declines among Hispanic applicants. By the mid-2010s, Prop 209 had caused a cumulative decline in the number of early-career URM Californians earning over $100,000 by at least 3 percent. Prop 209 also deterred thousands of qualified URM students from applying to any UC campus. Enrolling at less-selective UC campuses did not improve URM students' performance or persistence in STEM course sequences. Complementary regression discontinuity and institutional value-added analyses suggest that affirmative action's net wage benefits for URM applicants exceed its (potentially small) net costs for on-the-margin white and Asian applicants. These findings are inconsistent with the university "Mismatch Hypothesis" (at the mean) and provide the first causal evidence that banning affirmative action exacerbates socioeconomic inequities.

Long-Run Changes in Underrepresentation After Affirmative Action Bans in Public Universities

Affirmative action was banned in California, Texas, Washington, and Florida in the 1990s. Following this early wave, additional states banned the practice, including Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nebraska, New Hampshire, and Oklahoma. In response to concerns about underrepresented minorities’ falling college enrollment in flagship public universities, administrators and policymakers took a variety of steps to mitigate these declines. This article assesses the long-run changes in the racial and ethnic composition of selected universities after these bans. We find that the elimination of affirmative action has led to persistent declines in the share of underrepresented minorities among students admitted to and enrolling in public flagship universities in these states. These results imply that alternative policies and administrative decisions were unable to fully replace race-based affirmative action. Furthermore, we show that the antecedent conditions have only modestly improved in recent decades, suggesting that policymakers and administrators need to focus on improving these conditions.

American Social Liberalism and the Challenge of Ethnic Diversity: The Rise and Decline of Affirmative Action

In this article, it is argued that the progressive reform agenda of the mid-twentieth century liberal elite might have more effectively served the economic interests of non-white minorities had this generation of well-intentioned policy-makers been more attentive to the conservative criticism of the limits and pitfalls of their policies. As they turned preferential treatment into one of the mainstays of the national government’s anti-poverty strategies, and by supporting a new “welfare philosophy” that was essentially based on service provision, the social liberals in power during the sixties and seventies transformed government assistance into an even less popular approach to socioeconomic disparities. While they focused their vision of social progress on group advancement, they ended up further compromising their egalitarian agenda as their political choices and decisions gradually lost much of their early popular appeal. This liberal elite, it is argued, laid the foundation for a new egalitarian paradigm which presents racial integration through preferential treatment - or race-based affirmative action - as an ideal solution to the socioeconomic underperformance of disadvantaged non-white minorities, causing the former to definitively fall into disfavor.Keywords: Affirmative action, Laissez-faire, Public policy, US ethnic minorities, welfare

Affirmative Action and Pre-College Human Capital

Race-based affirmative action policies are widespread in higher education. Despite the prevalence of these policies, there is limited evidence on whether they affect students before they reach college. We exploit the 2003 Supreme Court ruling in Grutter v. Bollinger, which overturned affirmative action bans in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, but not in other states, to study the effect of affirmative action on high school students' outcomes. We analyze four data sets, including nationwide SAT data and administrative data for the state of Texas. The SAT data allow us to leverage state and time variation in difference-in-differences and synthetic control group analyses. Within Texas, variation in race, time, and ex ante ability further help us to isolate the effects of the policy change on secondary school grades, attendance, and college applications. Across data sets, outcomes, and identification strategies, the results all point toward gains for underrepresented minority students and reductions in the racial achievement gap. These gains were concentrated among students in the top of the ability distribution, who also experienced the largest increases in the returns to pre-college human capital in college admissions due to the policy change. This suggests that students increased their human capital investment in response to increases in the returns to effort.

The social unemployment gap in South Africa: Limits of enabling socio-economic redress through expanding access to higher education

The South African government recently adopted an education policy that attempts to achieve socio-economic redress through expanding free university education to first-year students from low-income backgrounds. However, in a country in which structural factors such as race, gender, and age continue to shape labor market outcomes, to what extent can attainment of university education significantly improve the labor market outcomes of historically marginalized groups? To evaluate the limits and possible unintended consequences of this policy intervention, I use nationally representative data from 1994 through 2017 to explore the correlation between a bachelor’s degree and the likelihood of unemployment. Using a logistic regression and predicted probabilities, I show that, despite the existence of a race-based affirmative action policy designed to alleviate structural barriers in South Africa’s labor market, structural factors still significantly attenuate the role of university education in enabling labor force participation among historically marginalized groups. I term the effect of these multi-dimensional structural barriers: the social unemployment gap. These findings suggest that the use of university education as a strategy for socio-economic redress in labor markets characterized by structural asymmetries extending beyond race necessitates the existence of intersectional labor market affirmative action policies.

Estimating Effects of Affirmative Action in Policing: A Replication and Extension

Many police departments in the United States have experienced externally-imposed affirmative action plans designed to increase the shares of nonwhite and female police officers. This paper examines whether externally-imposed affirmative action plans have impacted the rates of reported offenses and/or offenses cleared by arrest, seeking to replicate and extend Lott (2000) and McCrary (2007). Using a series of modern econometric strategies, including difference-in-differences decomposition and generalized synthetic controls, we do not find a significant effect of court-imposed affirmative action plans on the rates of reported offenses or reported offenses cleared by arrest, a finding consistent with McCrary (2007). We also consider whether unlitigated agencies change their practices due to the threat of litigation, but, like McCrary (2007), are unable to identify causal evidence of such threat effects. We suggest that, in the spirit of Miller and Segal (2018), future research seek to estimate the potentially racially heterogeneous treatment effects of race-based affirmative action plans on public safety outcomes.

The Unconstitutionality of Affirmative Action in U. S. College Admissions Policies

미국 대학입학정책에서 적극적 평등실현조치는 평등의 가치와 기회의 평등을 증진시키기 위한 교육의 역할과 관련해 중요한 문제가 되고 있으며, 특히 대학입학정책에서 문제되고 있는 것은 인종적 소수자에 대한 우대이다. 인종에 근거한 적극적 평등실현조치에 대하여 지원자의 피부색에 근거한 고정관념에 기초한 것이라는 비판도 제기되고 있지만, 인종은 유색인종의 삶속에서 어떤 형태로든 인종적 종속을 지속시키는 실질적 결과를 가져오고 있다. 미국 대학입학정책에서 사용된 적극적 평등실현조치는 연방대법원에서 그 위헌성 여부가 다투어졌으며, 이는 다시 대학의 입학정책에서의 변화를 가져왔다. 연방대법원 판결에서 제시하는 일정한 기준에 따라 대학들은 헌법상 허용되는 범주 내에서 입학정책을 마련하여 왔다. 이에 본 논문에서는 미국 대학입학정책에서의 적극적 평등실현조치와 관련된 연방대법원의 판결, 특히 2013년의 Fisher v. University of Texas 판결(Fisher I 판결)과 2016년 Fisher v. University of Texas 판결(Fisher II 판결)의 주요내용과 법리를 검토함으로써 인종에 근거한 적극적 평등실현조치의 위헌여부를 판단하는 심사기준과 구체적 입학정책의 위헌성여부를 살펴보고자 한다. 먼저 인종을 고려한 입학정책에 대하여 엄격심사기준을 적용함에 있어서, 필요불가피한 이익이라는 요건과 엄밀하게 재단되어질 것이라는 요건이 충족되었는지를 검토한다. 특히 후자의 요건과 관련하여 ‘필요 충분한 인원’의 의미와 인종중립적 대안의 심사에 관하여 살펴본다. 나아가 인종중립적 대안으로 여겨지고 있는 상위 10퍼센트 입학정책의 경우 과연 인종중립적인 것인지, 평등권을 침해하는 것인지에 대한 논의를 검토한다. 이러한 연구는 직접적으로 인종과 관계되지는 않았지만 우리나라 대학입학정책에서의 적극적 평등실현조치의 허용여부와 그 범위를 판단하는데 도움이 될 수 있으며, 또한 대학의 구체적 입학정책의 위헌성 여부를 판단하기 위해 적용되어야 할 심사기준과 그 요건을 검토하는데 도움을 줄 수 있다. 대학이 입학정책을 통하여 다양한 사회ㆍ경제적 약자를 배려하는 경우에도 평등권에 합치되는 것이어야 한다.Affirmative action is becoming an important issue related to the role of education for the value of equality and to elevate equal opportunity in American college admissions policies. In particular, the biggest issue with college admissions policies in the United States is preference given to racial minorities. While there are criticism made that race-based affirmative action is founded on stereotypes based on the skin color of applicants, but regardless of the form in the lives of people of color, race has brought upon the actual results of continuing racial subordination. The unconstitutionality of affirmative action in college admissions policies has been reviewed in the Supreme Court, and this has once again brought about changes in college admissions policies. Universities have created admissions policies within the scope allowed by the constitution according to the guidelines given through Supreme Court rulings. Accordingly, this study examined the Supreme Court’s decisions related to affirmative action for US college admissions policies. In particular, it reviewed the main contents and legal principles of the recent case, Fisher v. University of Texas (Fisher I) (2013) and Fisher v. University of Texas (Fisher II) (2016). The strict scrutiny applied to race-conscious admissions policies of the University of Texas at Austin was examined and it was also reviewed whether the “narrow tailoring” requirement other than compelling interests was satisfied. In addition, regarding “narrow tailoring” requirement, the meaning of critical mass and the importance of race-neutral alternatives were examined. Also, the meaning of changes made through the US Supreme Court rulings on affirmative action was reviewed. Such study can help judge whether to allow and the scope of affirmative action in Korean college admissions policies. Furthermore, it can help examine the judicial review standards and requirements that should be applied to judge the unconstitutionality of detailed admissions policies. Even if universities show consideration for people with various social and economic disadvantages through its admissions policies, this should not violate the equal rights of the constitution.

In Defense of Deference: The Case for Respecting Educational Autonomy and Expert Judgments in Fisher v. Texas

Less than a decade after deciding Grutter v. Bollinger, the Supreme Court will return to the contentious debate regarding race-based affirmative action when it considers the plan challenged in Fisher v. University of Texas. Although modeled after Grutter, an examination of the plan’s constitutionality is potentially complicated by the operation of the Texas Top Ten Percent Plan — an arguably effective race-neutral alternative. Central to the Court’s inquiry will be its willingness, or lack thereof, to respect UT’s assessment that despite the gains in diversity achieved by the Ten Percent Plan, the consideration of race in admissions decisions continues to be necessary to achieve its academic mission and goals. This article urges the Court to respect educators’ good faith decision making, particularly when it involves the development of academic missions as well as the measures needed to accomplish them. Failure to do so would undermine the Court’s prior practice of respecting educators’ autonomy as well as the Court’s call for restrained judicial involvement in complex, educational decision making. The article begins with an examination of the challenged plan as well as the Fifth Circuit’s opinions upholding the plan’s constitutionality. Following this examination, the article challenges the contention that deferring to educators’ race-based decision making “represents a digression in the course of constitutional law.” It argues that when properly viewed as a means by which to inform rather than to weaken a strict scrutiny inquiry, deference is an appropriate principle to apply when examining the constitutionality of race-based admissions plans such as that employed in Fisher. In light of the expertise and knowledge needed to craft and implement effective measures to carry out a university’s educational mission, the article urges the Court to defer to the University’s judgments concerning not only its asserted compelling interests, but also the narrowly tailored means by which to achieve such interests.

College affirmative action bans and smoking and alcohol use among underrepresented minority adolescents in the United States: A difference-in-differences study.

BackgroundCollege affirmative action programs seek to expand socioeconomic opportunities for underrepresented minorities. Between 1996 and 2013, 9 US states—including California, Texas, and Michigan—banned race-based affirmative action in college admissions. Because economic opportunity is known to motivate health behavior, banning affirmative action policies may have important adverse spillover effects on health risk behaviors. We used a quasi-experimental research design to evaluate the association between college affirmative action bans and health risk behaviors among underrepresented minority (Black, Hispanic, and Native American) adolescents.Methods and findingsWe conducted a difference-in-differences analysis using data from the 1991–2015 US national Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS). We compared changes in self-reported cigarette smoking and alcohol use in the 30 days prior to survey among underrepresented minority 11th and 12th graders in states implementing college affirmative action bans (Arizona, California, Florida, Michigan, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, Texas, and Washington) versus outcomes among those residing in states not implementing bans (n = 35 control states). We also assessed whether underrepresented minority adults surveyed in the 1992–2015 Tobacco Use Supplement to the Current Population Survey (TUS-CPS) who were exposed to affirmative action bans during their late high school years continued to smoke cigarettes between the ages of 19 and 30 years. Models adjusted for individual demographic characteristics, state and year fixed effects, and state-specific secular trends. In the YRBS (n = 34,988 to 36,268, depending on the outcome), cigarette smoking in the past 30 days among underrepresented minority 11th–12th graders increased by 3.8 percentage points after exposure to an affirmative action ban (95% CI: 2.0, 5.7; p < 0.001). In addition, there were also apparent increases in past-30-day alcohol use, by 5.9 percentage points (95% CI: 0.3, 12.2; p = 0.041), and past-30-day binge drinking, by 3.5 percentage points (95% CI: −0.1, 7.2, p = 0.058), among underrepresented minority 11th–12th graders, though in both cases adjustment for multiple comparisons resulted in failure to reject the null hypothesis (adjusted p = 0.083 for both outcomes). Underrepresented minority adults in the TUS-CPS (n = 71,575) exposed to bans during their late high school years were also 1.8 percentage points more likely to report current smoking (95% CI: 0.1, 3.6; p = 0.037). Event study analyses revealed a discrete break for all health behaviors timed with policy discussion and implementation. No substantive or statistically significant effects were found for non-Hispanic White adolescents, and the findings were robust to a number of additional specification checks. The limitations of the study include the continued potential for residual confounding from unmeasured time-varying factors and the potential for recall bias due to the self-reported nature of the health risk behavior outcomes.ConclusionsIn this study, we found evidence that some health risk behaviors increased among underrepresented minority adolescents after exposure to state-level college affirmative action bans. These findings suggest that social policies that shift socioeconomic opportunities could have meaningful population health consequences.