Admissions

Research related to College Admissions

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.