In 1995, Teachers College Record published an article by Gloria Ladson-Billings and William Tate entitled "Toward a Critical Race Theory of Education". In this article, the authors proposed that critical race theory (CRT), a framework developed by legal scholars, could be employed to examine the role of race and racism in education. Within a few…

This study addresses whether whites' rejection of affirmative action reflects an opposition to group-based preferences per se, independent of their attitudes toward blacks. Analysis of 1996 General Social Survey data shows that whites' attitude toward preferential hiring and promotion of blacks is predicted by their attitude toward preferential…

How did the University of Michigan become a viable defendant of race-conscious admissions policies? Pursuing a simple legal strategy to address "Gratz v. Bollinger" (2003) and "Grutter v. Bollinger" (2003) was certainly an option; however, Michigan's leadership chose to respond in ways that increased the institution's role in the affirmative…

This study examines trends in University of California (UC) "no shows" - students who applied and were admitted to UC but enrolled elsewhere - before and after the elimination of affirmative action at UC in 1998. Two main findings emerge from the data. Overall, UC continues to be successful in attracting and enrolling a majority of high-achieving…

The conflict between access and quality in education has been front-page news for decades. Policies regarding the role of elite universities, the organisation of secondary education, admissions criteria, courses of study, high stakes testing, and fiscal and programme accountability have changed with uncommon frequency, resulting in confusion and…

This article examines one university's policies regarding Native mascots and ethnic fraud through a Tribal Critical Race Theory analytic lens. Using the principle of interest convergence, we argue that institutions of higher education allow and even work actively towards a particular form or level of diversity, but they do not extend it far…

This paper describes the results of a detailed study relating the performance of undergraduate students admitted to Brazil's State University of Campinas (Unicamp) from 1994 through 1997 and their socioeconomic and educational background. The study is based on a hierarchical model for the relevant variables involved. The main result is that…

This article reports on research funded by the Australian Research Council to investigate school responses to gender equity. It addresses the efforts of a disadvantaged school to tackle what they perceived to be gender inequalities, but in the process of constructing a top-set and bottom-set/stream class they are developing new forms of old…

This article reports on a U.S. Supreme Court decision that struck down two voluntary school-integration plans in a 5-to-4 ruling issued last week. Its decision left solidly intact its precedents dealing with affirmative action in higher education. Rather than signaling any clear desire to revisit its past decisions on race-conscious admissions…

In this article, the author provides insight on the issue of diversity in higher education. The author asserts that diversity--one of the great strengths of American education--is under siege today. At the elementary- and secondary-school levels, resegregation is making it exceedingly difficult for minority students to get the resources that…

A comparative analysis of how access and equity are defined and how policies have evolved reveals a number of commonalities and differences between countries. The overall trend is a movement from the priority given to "inherited merit" in the admission process through a commitment to formal equality, towards the application of some modes of…

Born out of one legal battle over affirmative action, the Texas college-admissions policy known as the "top 10 percent plan" is now at the center of another. The University of Texas at Austin is being challenged in U.S. District Court over its 2004 decision to return to using race-conscious admissions criteria after years without them.…

Many countries mandate affirmative action in university admissions for traditionally disadvantaged groups. Little is known about either the efficacy or costs of these programs. This paper examines affirmative action in engineering colleges in India for "lower-caste" groups. We find that it successfully targets the financially…

Using policy discourse analysis, the author analyzed 21 diversity action plans issued at 20 U.S. land-grant universities over a five-year period to identify images of diversity and the problems and solutions represented in diversity action plans. Discourses of marketplace, excellence, managerialism, and democracy emerged and served to construct…

Public higher education has undergone a process similar to that in the national polity: a one-sided struggle by those with power to shape the institution to be more market driven, more focused on what will generate (non-state) revenues, more dominated by top administrators, and less concerned about the working class and people of color. This…