The recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions "Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College" (2023) and "Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina et al." (2023), hereafter collectively referred to as "SFFA v. Harvard," have garnered attention, especially among…

In a plurality opinion in the 1978 Supreme Court case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, Justice Lewis Powell held that colleges and universities could consider an applicant's race in the admissions process in order to attain a diverse student body. In a pair of cases that will be decided in the current term, the Supreme Court has…

Affirmative Action in higher education exemplifies interest convergence, and beyond this, interest divergence and imperialistic reclamation. Diversity initiatives, such as the Inclusive Excellence initiative, have adopted key strategies and reasoning developed in Affirmative Action Supreme Court cases. This paper shows how semantic concessions and…

In her 2024 State of the State address, New York Governor Kathy Hochul introduced the Top 10% Promise, a policy offering New York students ranked in the top 10% of their high school class direct admission to the State University of New York (SUNY) system. "Access to higher education," she said, "has the potential to transform the…

In its 2023 decision in "Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard," the Supreme Court effectively ended its approval of affirmative action in higher education admissions, holding that practices at Harvard and the University of North Carolina (UNC) were unlawful. The Court concluded that UNC's practices violated the guarantee of equal…

In June, the U.S. Supreme Court brought to a close the country's decades-long experiment in affirmative action in a pair of closely watched cases--"Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College" and "Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina"--and overturned the use of racial…

The Supreme Court is taking up affirmative action at colleges and universities for the sixth time in 50 years. In that litany, an early case was the University of California vs. Bakke. Bakke complained about being denied admission to the university's medical school because seats were guaranteed for minority applicants, thus barring the door to him…

Many institutions of higher learning aim to promote greater racial diversity to harness learning benefits and foster a sense of inclusion. Nevertheless, the institutional pursuit of racial diversity is difficult to benchmark. The current constitutional boundary limits the use of race to promote the diversity in college admissions to a…

Affirmative action in postsecondary admissions may be the most visible area where the battles over the consideration of race in educational policy and practice have played out in the law. After decades of sustained legal attacks on the efforts of universities to implement policies that disrupt racial inequalities, many in the higher education…

According to the authors of "Higher Education for American Democracy," the role of education in a democratic society "is not merely to meet the demands of the present" but to "serve as an instrument of social transition" (p. 6). A democratic university should be a living model of democracy that could embody the civic…

Diversity is a ubiquitous concept in Education. Our contemporary racial discourse has been taken over by diversity talk. That is, to talk about race in the colorblind era in the contexts of school admissions or educational policy is to do so through the language of diversity. However, the hegemonic ascendancy of diversity has been dependent on the…

Affirmative action is a topic that has been a flashpoint amongst policymakers, lawmakers, and the public since President Kennedy introduced the phrase in 1961. Within education, a legal status quo has been in place since the Supreme Court's ruling in "Regents of the University of California v. Bakke" (1978), banning strict racial quotas…

Ongoing sociolegal conflicts over affirmative action in race-conscious admissions in U.S. higher education have significant modern-day relevance. This article, informed mainly by Asian American women's scholarship, explores discourse in U.S. Supreme Court rulings and oral arguments and how litigation actors continue to recycle this discourse in…

Affirmative action in education is once again in the media and cultural spotlight. The Trump administration, along with a decidedly rightward shift on the Supreme Court, signal a bleak outlook for affirmative action policies in higher education. However, as educators, we can also use this historical moment to have robust and critical conversations…

The policies, priorities, and productivity of postsecondary admission offices are under a great deal of scrutiny. The current realities range from the pressures of tuition-driven institutions to deliver the majority of the university budget each fall, to more selective institutions wrestling with standards of which applicants to accept amid…