Education is the value proposition that provides individuals the opportunity to become meaningful contributors to society, their community, and their immediate families. It is the calling card of personal achievement and individual intrinsic benefits. Education is about access and opportunity. Institutions continue to navigate strategies of access…

High-achieving African American students in California are not attending University of California (UC) campuses. Due to hyper-implementations of Proposition 209, which limited UC campuses' ability to use race as a significant admission criteria, the UC system and individual UC campus policies have scaled back their efforts to recruit…

Access to higher education is a key determinant of lifetime earnings in the U.S. Since the 1960s, selective public universities have admitted students mostly on the basis of standardized test scores and other measures of academic preparation. In this dissertation, I employ quasi-experimental and structural research designs to investigate the…

This essay discusses the contentious events leading to the decision by the University of California's Board of Regents to end affirmative action in admissions, hiring and contracting at the university in July 1995. This controversial decision provided momentum for California's passage of Proposition 209 the following year ending "racial…

One of the important arguments by critics of affirmative action is that it actually hurts the students it is supposed to help by subjecting them to the "stigma" of being admitted under policies explicitly seeking campus diversity. Such students, this theory argues, must feel embarrassed and uncomfortable as a result and would prefer to…

This timely book examines issues pertaining to equal opportunity--affirmative action, challenges to it, and alternatives for improving opportunities for underrepresented groups--in higher education today. Its starting point is California's Proposition 209, which ended race-based affirmative action in public education and the workplace in 1996. The…

In June 2007, the Supreme Court limited the tools that school districts could use to voluntarily integrate schools. In the aftermath of the decision, educators around the country have sought models of successful plans that would also be legal. One such model may be Berkeley Unified School District's (BUSD) plan. Earlier this year, the California…

After the 2003 U.S. Supreme Court decisions on the University of Michigan admission cases, which struck down racial preferences and quotas in Michigan's undergraduate and law school admission, several groups have challenged race-conscious admission, school placement policies and academic support programs. Even the federal government has challenged…

Opponents of higher education affirmative action programs are gearing up to launch their largest attack in recent years. The planned assault comes in the wake of the recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that severely limited the use of race in K-12 integration plans. It was Ward Connerly, the chairman of the American Civil Rights Institute, a…

This policy analysis article examines how California State University-Long Beach, an institution where upward of 22,000 student applied for roughly 3,400 freshman slots and where the transfer class had to be reduced because of mandatory enrollment reductions, tested race-neutral admissions models in accordance with Proposition 209, which prohibits…

The importance of diversity and inclusion to higher education was the focus of intense legal and social scientific analysis in the decisions of the United States Supreme Court concerning affirmative action at the University of Michigan. The leadership of higher education and several other sectors of society offered overwhelming support, and a…

These proceedings present testimony from the California Senate Select Committee on Higher Education Admissions and Outreach and the California Senate Select Committee on Higher Education regarding undergraduate admissions at the University of California (UC) in the aftermath of Proposition 209 and California Board of Regents' Special Proposal 1…

This report provides background materials related to the California Senate Select Committee on Higher Education Admissions and Outreach and the California Senate Select Committee on Higher Education hearing on undergraduate admissions at the University of California (UC) and the Board of Regents' Special Proposal 1 (SP-1), which eliminated the use…