Race-based Affirmative Action Research Articles

How Integrating the 5 Pillars of Community Practice Can Transform Physical Therapist Education and Reduce Health Disparities.

Patient history assists clinicians in determining the most appropriate tests to identify the symptoms' source and select appropriate interventions. Therefore, a subjective history is an essential component of patient management. When physical therapist practitioners transition into academia, they must understand how the history of the education system may affect learners. Health disparities are related to the lack of workforce diversity and skills in cultural responsiveness, and the education system is critical in addressing the impact of future providers on health disparities. Developing a doctor of physical therapy program to address health disparities requires an analysis of the historical context of the US educational and health care systems, along with traditional components of physical therapist education. This country's education system was built upon a 2-tiered system, where minoritized individuals struggled to overcome barriers imposed by legislation and societal beliefs. Jim Crow laws continued this unequal access to education, and the recent Supreme Court ruling to deny race-based affirmative action continues these inequities. This historical context informed the construction of the College of Saint Mary Doctor of Physical Therapy Program. The program's mission led to using less traditional educational approaches; thus, the pillars of practice took form. The 5 pillars evolved to include social determinants, inclusive faculty and student recruitment and retention practices, equitable grading, culturally responsive pedagogy, and community development. The purpose of this paper is to present a historical overview of the US education system and its influence on physical therapist education. Furthermore, it will illustrate how this historical context inspired the 5 Pillars of Community Practice from College of Saint Mary and discuss the challenges and interventions related to these pillars. There are tremendous disparities in educational outcomes and patient services in the United States. Disparities are most significant in those with historically marginalized identities. If those disparities are to improve, a change is required in the people providing care to patients. The best way to accomplish this is by transforming how future providers are educated.

The Effectiveness of race-based affirmative action in U.S. university admissions and other comparative proposals.

One of U.S. politics’ great debates in recent decades has been the presence of race-based affirmative action in the admissions processes of their universities, with June 2023’s landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which banned this policy, a culmination of this debate. It has been suggested that educational race-based affirmative action is a necessary response to the historical injustices that existed for members of minority racial groups in the U.S. education system, as well as the ongoing consequences of these injustices. Similar issues regarding the reconciliation of past injustices perpetuated against racial minority groups have emerged as a prominent issue on a global level. Resolving this issue is complicated by the variety of perspectives on how these conflicts should be resolved as well as accurately determining the ongoing implications of historic injustices. Using the research question “To what extent can the presence of race-based affirmative action in admissions processes of U.S. universities be considered the most effective method of addressing historical racial injustices in education?” to focus the investigation, this paper contends that combining class-based affirmative action in the short-term with a long-term goal of following a method named ‘the communitarian proposal’ is the most effective way of addressing the aforementioned historical injustices in education.

Diversity in Education: The U.S. Supreme Court Got It Wrong

ABSTRACT Diversity has repeatedly been shown to be a vital part of education. This paper explores the benefits and importance of diversity in education and presents studies and supporting research. In the case Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, the United States Supreme Court found that race-based affirmative action in college admissions is unconstitutional because it violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibits discrimination based on race. As colleges and universities are trying to be more inclusive and varied, the Supreme Court’s finding just made it more difficult for colleges to secure a diverse population which will hurt education and likely lead to an adverse outcome for society. Diversity has many important benefits and is especially advantageous in education. Diversity increases creativity, critical thinking, helps reduce achievement gaps, and improves academic performance, student motivation, and intellectual engagement. Increasing diversity can increase empathy, appreciation of other cultures, and can help create a sense of community on campus. It can also help create inclusive attitudes and respect for others, can aid in removing biases and stereotypes, and can help prepare students for careers in an increasingly interconnected world. When weighing the benefits of diversity against what is actually written in the law, it seems the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court made the wrong decision.

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

The aim of this article is to consider whether, when, and why it is morally right to treat members of socially disadvantaged racial or ethnic groups favorably when allocating scarce medical resources. Since the COVID 2019 pandemic has had different impacts on racial and ethnic groups, some U.S. states have given racial and ethnic minorities preferential access to COVID-19 vaccines, leading to controversy over the moral and legal permissibility of doing so. I examine three arguments for affirmative action—the compensation, equality-of-opportunity, and antidiscrimination arguments—and argue that both the equality-of-opportunity and antidiscrimination arguments have the potential to provide well-founded justification for race-based affirmative action for the allocation of scarce medical resources. I also consider further moral requirements that instances of affirmative action based on both or either of the two arguments should comply with for them to be justified.

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.

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.