Affirmative Action in Higher Education

Assessing the Impact of Eliminating Affirmative Action in Higher Education

This research examines the determinants of the match between high school seniors and postsecondary institutions in the United States. I model college application decisions as a nonsequential search problem and specify a unified structural model of college application, admission, and matriculation decisions that are all functions of unobservable individual heterogeneity. The results indicate tha...

High-stakes testing in employment, credentialing, and higher education. Prospects in a post-affirmative-action world.

Cognitively loaded tests of knowledge, skill, and ability often contribute to decisions regarding education, jobs, licensure, or certification. Users of such tests often face difficult choices when trying to optimize both the performance and ethnic diversity of chosen individuals. The authors describe the nature of this quandary, review research on different strategies to address it, and recomm...

Of Doubt and Diversity: The Future of Affirmative Action in Higher Education

The jurisprudence of affirmative action in higher education has been plagued by ambivalence and ambiguity. In 1978, the United States Supreme Court tried to quell the controversy over race-conscious admissions in the Bakke case. The Justices’ decision permitted institutions of higher education to continue their admissions practices, but the fragmented opinions hardly quieted critics of affirmat...

Evidence About the Potential Role for Affirmative Action in Higher Education

In two recent cases involving the University of Michigan, the Supreme Court examined whether race should be allowed to play an explicit role in the admission decisions of schools. The primary argument in these court cases and others has been that racial diversity strengthens the quality of education offered to all students. Underlying this argument is the notion that educational benefits arise ...

Affirmative Action in Higher Education: Insults, Preferences, and the Dworkin Defense