College Access
Our current research topics related to college access include college admissions, affirmative action, financing, diversity, and underrepresented students in higher education.
Two thousand-eight marked the 30th anniversary of the Supreme Court's Bakke decision, which legally upheld the consideration of race as a factor in admissions decisions for the purpose of promoting diversity in higher education. Such affirmative action policies have opened the doors of selective colleges and universities to many more minority students than might have otherwise had opportunities. While access to higher education has improved for minorities in this country, that progress is still severely threatened due, in part, to a series of very serious attacks on affirmative action. In 1996, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, in Hopwood v. University of Texas Law School, ended all considerations of race in admissions, recruitment, and scholarships at the undergraduate and graduate school level at all public institutions under its jurisdiction (i.e., Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana). In 1996, California voters passed Proposition 209, a ballot initiative that also eliminated affirmative action in education, employment, and contracting throughout the state. And, the University of Michigan faced legal challenges in 2003 to both its undergraduate and law school admissions policies that give consideration to race/ethnicity.
Recent College Access Research
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Diversity Challenged: Evidence on the Impact of Affirmative Action
- In the courts and in referenda campaigns, affirmative action in college admissions is under full-scale attack. Though it was designed to help resolve a variety of serious racial problems, affirmative action's survival may turn on just one question--whether or not the educational value of diversity is sufficiently compelling to justify consideration of race as a factor in deciding whom to admit to colleges and universities.
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The Hopwood Decision in Texas as an Attack on Latino Access to Selective Higher Education Programs
- This paper looks at the effects of the Hopwood decision on Latino students and examines factors impacting Latino students' access to higher education.
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Diversity and Legal Education: Student Experiences in Leading Law Schools
- This study reports on the experiences of students captured in a high response-rate survey administered by the Gallup Poll at two of the nation's most competitive law schools, Harvard Law School and the University of Michigan Law School, as well as through data collected through an email/internet survey at five other law schools. The data indicate that the Supreme Court was correct in its conclusions about the impact of diversity in Bakke and earlier higher education decisions.
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Reconfiguring Admissions to Serve the Mission of Selective Public Higher Education
- This paper first spells out several of these consequences of basing admissions solely on high-stakes standardized, norm-referenced tests . It then considers whether HSSNRTs are technically adequate to justify such consequences. Next, it offers a principled resolution to the debate between advocates of score-ranked admissions and proponents of diversity.
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Affirmative Action as a Wedge Issue: Prop 209 and The 1996 Presidential Election
- This paper analyzes the "wedge issue" strategy from both a geopolitical and survey based perspective relying on the GIS mapping of the Statewide Database and a preelection survey that oversampled minorities in different types of neighborhood contexts. We find that although white voters overwhelmingly supported Prop 209, including independent and moderate Democrats, the issue failed to swing their vote from Clinton to Dole because it was less important than other more traditional Presidential issues such as the economy. Nonwhite and the loyal Republicans were more concerned about Prop 209 than others, but their Presidential votes were not in question.
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Chilling Admissions: The Affirmative Action Crisis and the Search for Alternatives
- The essays in this volume represent the work of the leading scholars of affirmative action in higher education, and place the current crisis on campus in its larger context of historical discrimination and the legal battle for educational equity.
