research paper on affirmative action

Affirmative Action: Foundations and Key Concepts

This non-exhaustive reading list discusses the origins of affirmative action, the question of race vs. class, and the effects of meritocracy.

Affirmative action seeks to increase the representation of women and minorities in employment and education, spaces where they have been historically excluded. However, the discussion of preferential treatment based on racial or socioeconomic status has ignited intense public controversy, as highlighted through the college admissions scandal. The scandal exposed the underlying tensions between class and race in the United States, exhibiting the ways in which privilege is opposed to fairness.

The following non-exhaustive reading list discusses the origins of affirmative action, the question of race- versus class-based affirmative action, and the effects of meritocracy in admissions.    

The Origins of Affirmative Action  

Tierney, William G. “The Parameters of Affirmative Action: Equity and Excellence in the Academy.” Review of Educational Research , 1997

Tierney provides a historical analysis of affirmative action in higher education. Why was it needed as a policy? He then outlines the philosophical and legal ramifications of affirmative action before evaluating criticism and alternatives. He concludes that affirmative action should not be about rewriting past wrongs. Rather, the goal is to develop policies that serve the public good by advancing diversity and facilitating a culture of public participation.

Stulberg, L., & Chen, A.  “The Origins of Race-conscious Affirmative Action in Undergraduate Admissions: A Comparative Analysis of Institutional Change in Higher Education.” Sociology of Education , 2014

This comparative and institutional analysis of race-conscious affirmative action policies found that affirmative action arose in two waves during the 1960s. The first wave of adoption occurred in the early 1960s, by colleges in the North that were inspired by the nonviolent civil rights protests occurring in the South. The second wave of adoption emerged in the late 1960s as a response to student protests on campus.

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Race- vs. Class-Based Affirmative Action

Bok, Derek. “Assessing the Results of Race-Sensitive College Admissions.” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education , 2000

Derek Bok, the former president of Harvard University, discusses race-based affirmative action in college admissions. After studying more than 60,000 students, the author learned that most minority students attending selective colleges would have been rejected under a “race-neutral” admissions process. Bok assesses the different policy alternatives, like class-based affirmative action and top 10 percent plans. However, he concludes that these policies likely would not lead to the creation of racially diverse classes. He concludes that race-conscious admissions are the only solution that achieves diversity by admitting the best qualified minority students.

Cancian, Maria. “Race-Based versus Class-Based Affirmative Action in College Admissions.” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management , 1998

Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, Cancian tries to simulate the impact of moving away from a race-based admissions process to class-based affirmative action by examining whether racial and ethnic minorities would be eligible for a class-based program. A class-based college admissions process likely would bound the eligibility of racial and ethnic minorities and would not have similar results to race-based affirmative action.

Holzer, H., & Neumark, D. “ Affirmative Action: What Do We Know?” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management , 2006

This research report evaluates the effects of affirmative action on employment, college admissions, and government contracting. The empirical evidence shows that affirmative action programs shift employment, admissions, and government contracting away from white men and toward women and other minorities. However, these shifts in employment and college admissions do not have significant or large effects on the representation of minorities in colleges and university programs. Holzer and Neumark note that replacing race-based affirmative action with a different set of policies based on income or class rank likely would reduce the number of minorities enrolled at selective colleges.

Malamud, Deborah. “Assessing Class-Based Affirmative Action.” Journal of Legal Education , 1997

Malamud discusses why class-based affirmative action will likely not achieve economic equity in higher education. She also discusses why a class-based admission process is  less likely to achieve racial equality.

Sander, Richard. “Experimenting with Class-Based Affirmative Action.” Journal of Legal Education , 1997

Sander discusses how UCLA School of Law incorporated class-based preferences into its admissions system and then evaluates the results. He discusses how the class preference system increased the socioeconomic diversity of the student body but had mixed results in preserving racial diversity.

The Challenges of Meritocracy

Liu, Amy. “Unraveling the myth of meritocracy within the context of US higher education.” Higher Education , 2011

Liu argues that in meritocracy, social status becomes intertwined with level of education. Colleges and universities are now the gatekeepers of class positions and access to them will determine future class status. Liu discusses how higher education should serve as an instrument to expand opportunity and not be reduced to a “defensive necessity.” She signals that it is important for researchers to examine the theoretical basis of meritocracy and its consequences in higher education.

Espenshade, T., Chung, C., & Walling, J. “Admission Preferences for Minority Students, Athletes, and Legacies at Elite Universities.” Social Science Quarterly , 2004

Espenshade, Chung, and Walling examine the college admissions process and the preferences for athletes, children of alumni, and minority applicants. The authors note how elite universities give additional weight to different characteristics in which academic preferences for athletes and legacies often compete with the preference for minority applicants.

Critical Race Theory

Yosso, T., Parker, L., Solórzano, D., & Lynn, M. “From Jim Crow to Affirmative Action and Back Again: A Critical Race Discussion of Racialized Rationales and Access to Higher Education.” Review of Research in Education , 2004

Using the framework of critical race theory, the authors discuss the role of race and racism in shaping educational institutions. They also discuss how color-blind, diversity, and remedial legal rationales are shaped by race and racism, underlining how conservatives challenge affirmative action based on a “colorblind” rationale, where race-blind admissions ensure meritocracy. Liberals, on the other hand, defend affirmative action based on a diversity rationale, where minority students enrich the learning environment for white students. The remedial rationale wishes to grant minority groups access as a partial remedy for past and current discrimination.

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The Case for Affirmative Action

• Posted July 11, 2018
• By Leah Shafer

For decades, affirmative action has been a deeply integral — and deeply debated — aspect of college admissions in the United States. The idea that colleges can (and in some cases, should) consider race as a factor in whom they decide to admit has been welcomed by many as a solution to racial inequities and divides. But others have dismissed the policy as outdated in our current climate, and at times scorned it as a form of reverse racial discrimination.

That latter stance gained a much stronger footing last week when the Departments of Education and Justice officially withdrew Obama-era guidance on affirmative action, signaling that the Trump administration stands behind race-blind admissions practices.

We spoke with Natasha Warikoo , an expert on the connection between college admissions and racial diversity, about what affirmative action has accomplished in the past 50 years, and whether this shift in guidance will severely affect admissions policies in the years to come. We share her perspectives here.

The purpose of affirmative action:

Affirmative action was developed in the 1960s to address racial inequality and racial exclusion in American society. Colleges and universities wanted to be seen as forward-thinking on issues of race.

Then, in the late 1970s, affirmative action went to the United States Supreme Court. There, the only justification accepted, by Justice Powell, was the compelling state interest in a diverse student body in which everyone benefits from a range of perspectives in the classroom.

Today, when colleges talk about affirmative action, they rarely mention the issue of inequality, or even of a diverse leadership. Instead, they focus on the need for a diverse student body in which everyone benefits from a range of perspectives in the classroom.

Colleges have fully taken on this justification — to the point that, today, they rarely mention the issue of inequality, or even of a diverse leadership, perhaps because they’re worried about getting sued. But this justification leads to what I call in my book a “ diversity bargain ,” in that many white students see the purpose of affirmative action as to benefit them , through a diverse learning environment. This justification, which ignored equity, leads to some unexpected, troubling expectations on the part of white students.

What affirmative action has accomplished in terms of diversity on college campuses:

William Bowen and Derek Bok’s classic book The Shape of the River systematically looks at the impact of affirmative action by exploring decades of data from a group of selective colleges. They find that black students who probably benefited from affirmative action — because their achievement data is lower than the average student at their colleges — do better in the long-run than their peers who went to lower-status universities and probably did not benefit from affirmative action. The ones who benefited are more likely to graduate college and to earn professional degrees, and they have higher incomes.

So affirmative action acts as an engine for social mobility for its direct beneficiaries. This in turn leads to a more diverse leadership, which you can see steadily growing in the United States.

But what about other students — whites and those from a higher economic background? Decades of research in higher education show that classmates of the direct beneficiaries also benefit. These students have more positive racial attitudes toward racial minorities, they report greater cognitive capacities, they even seem to participate more civically when they leave college.

None of these changes would have happened without affirmative action. States that have banned affirmative action can show us that. California, for example, banned affirmative action in the late 1990s, and at the University of California, Berkeley, the percentage of black undergraduates has fallen from 6 percent in 1980 to only 3 percent in 2017 . 

Decades of research in higher education show that classmates of the direct beneficiaries of affirmative also benefit. They have more positive racial attitudes toward racial minorities, they report greater cognitive capacities, they even seem to participate more civically when they leave college.

What the Trump administration's reversal of guidance on affirmative action means for admissions practices:

The guidance is simply guidance — it’s not legally binding. It indicates what the administration thinks, and how it might act. In that sense, this guidance is not surprising — many would have guessed that Trump and his team believe universities should avoid taking race into consideration in admissions. Indeed, the Department of Justice under Trump last summer already reopened a case filed under the Obama administration claiming racial discrimination in college admissions.

I hope that colleges and universities will stand behind affirmative action, given its many benefits. The U.S. Supreme Court has decided in favor of affirmative action multiple times — it is settled law.

However — the decision in Fisher v. Texas made clear that colleges would no longer be afforded good faith understanding that they have tried all other race-neutral alternatives before turning to affirmative action. In other words, if asked in court, colleges need to be able to show that they tried all other race-neutral alternatives to creating a diverse student body, and those alternatives failed. This means that affirmative action has already been “narrowly tailored” to the “compelling state interest” of a diverse student body — required by anti-discrimination laws. Ironically, race-based decisions come under scrutiny because of anti-discrimination laws designed to protect racial minorities; these laws are now being used to make claims about supposed anti-white discrimination when policies attempt to address racial inequality.

Additional Resources

• Read our 2016 Q+A with Warikoo following the Fisher v. Texas decision
• Listen to Warikoo discuss the Trump administration's reversal on a recent WBUR interview
• More background on the Trump administration's policy shift on affirmative action.

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The impact of racial identity and school composition on affirmative action attitudes of African American college students

Germine h. awad.

a Department of Psychology, The University of Michigan, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

Kimberly Tran

b Department of Psychology, Fayetteville State University, Fayetteville, NC, USA

Brittany Hall-Clark

c The University of Texas Health Science Center, Psychiatry, San Antonio TX, USA

Collette Chapman-Hilliard

d Counseling and Human Development, The University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA

Jendayi Dillard

e Department of Educational Psychology, University of Texas-Austin, Austin, TX, USA

Taylor Payne

Elaine hess, karen jackson.

f Educational Psychology and Assessment, Soka University, Aliso Viejo, CA, USA

Affirmative Action remains a controversial policy that incites a variety of reactions. Some believe it’s an unjust policy that discriminates against applicants, while others view it as a policy aimed at fighting against past inequalities and discrimination. Little is known about African American endorsement of the policy. Two hundred and seven Black students from a predominantly White institution (PWI) and a historically Black university (HBCU) participated in the current study to examine the impact of racial identity on affirmative action attitudes (AA). Results indicated that school type and race centrality significantly predicted AA attitudes. Students who attended a HBCU were less likely to endorse AA compared to students at the PWI and those higher in race centrality were more likely to endorse AA. This study is one of the first to investigate the impact of the educational environment on the affirmative action attitudes of African Americans.

Affirmative action is a controversial and complicated issue, often evoking a range of emotions and opinions. Opponents of affirmative action often view it as an unjust policy that discriminates against applicants (mainly White men), while proponents view affirmative action a a policy aimed at remedying historical discriminatory practices and increasing the numbers of underrrperesented applicants (e.g. ethnically minoritized individuals, women, and veterans) in the workforce and higher education. Although affirmative action policies are utilized in both industry and education, its use in higher education has elicited stronger debate and reaction about merit and equality than in employment settings ( Crosby et al., 2006 ). This is evidenced by a number of high-profile lawsuits against a number of universities in the United States, including the University of Michigan, University of Texas, and Harvard University (e.g. Hartocollis, 2020 ; Peralta, 2016 ; Peterson, 2003 ). Despite the controversial nature of the policy, its complexities are often ambiguous and not well understood. Affirmative action programs are designed to help increase diversity in higher education by implementing proactive recruitment and retention programs targeting underrepresented groups. Many institutions of higher education have asserted that diversity leads to positive educational outcomes and therefore measures to increase diversity are necessary ( Gurin et al., 2007 ).

Postsecondary enrollment among ethnic minority college students has slowly increased over the past several decades. Specifically, African American student enrollment has increased from 9% in the mid-1970s to 13% by 2018 ( National Center for Education Statistics, 2019 ). However, this enrollment increase among African Americans has not been a steady increase, particularly with the elimination of affirmative action policies. For example, following the 1996 Hopwood decision, a court case that upheld the decision that race could not be considered in admissions or financial aid decisions, the flagship universities in Texas experienced a significant decline in the number of African American and Hispanic applicants ( Tienda et al., 2003 ). Dickson (2006) suggests affirmative action bans decreased the percentage of African American and Hispanic students applying to college in Texas by 2.1% and 1.6% respectively. The ban of racial preference in college admissions in Texas also reflected a decrease in retention and graduation rates among ethnically minoritized students by 2%-5%, depending on the cohort examined ( Cortes, 2010 ). Similarly, other states experienced declines in ethnically minoritized student enrollment after the elimination of affirmative action policies. According to the University of California Office of Student Research (1998) , ethnically minoritized student enrollment declined nearly 21% after the ban on the consideration of race in admissions was implemented.

Race, racism and affirmative action

Although significant strides have been made, proponents of affirmative action assert that goals of equality have not yet been met ( Clayton & Crosby, 2000 ) and that discrimination and prejudice are still pervasive ( Bergmann, 1996 ; Swim et al., 2001 ). Racial/ethnic differences in affirmative action attitudes have consistently been found in the literature. One theory proposes that these differences are related to self-interest ( Bobo, 1998 ; Oh et al., 2010 ). Beneficiaries of affirmative action, including people of color and women, typically endorse more favorable attitudes towards the policy ( Awad et al., 2005 ; Bobo, 1998 ; Oh et al., 2010 ). However, Oh et al. (2010) compared both the group-interest and racism beliefs model, and found that racism beliefs are more strongly related to affirmative action attitudes than are self-interests.

While Americans’ attitudes towards affirmative action have grown steadily more positive over the years ( Pew Research Center, 2017 ), a strong and vocal opposition persists. Although affirmative action was designed to correct a long history of unequal resources and opportunities, opponents of the policy protest the alleged preferential treatment of ethnically minoritized groups. Awad et al. (2005) note that opponents of affirmative action often mischaracterize it as a means to give people of color an unfair advantage over Whites. Federico and Sidanius (2002) have described such arguments as ‘principled objection’ to affirmation action, due to the fact that they may appear to be race-neutral and instead rooted in concerns about fairness, justice, and merit. Several researchers ( Awad et al., 2005 ; Matsueda & Drakulich, 2009 ; Oh et al., 2010 ) have noted that racism has taken more subtle, covert forms that have become embedded within the ethos of American values, such as work ethic and individualism. Yet such beliefs can reflect covert racism by asserting that people of color would advance if they only worked harder. Individuals who hold attitudes such as these believe that discrimination is no longer a problem in the United States and that Blacks often deserve the poorer treatment they receive.

In response to the call for increased research focused primarily on beneficiaries of affirmative action, several studies have investigated African Americans’ reactions to related policies and plans ( Antwi-Boasiako & Asagba, 2005 ; Slaughter et al., 2002 ), generally indicating endorsement of the policy. There have been few studies, however, that investigate factors that may influence differing attitudes of affirmative action among African Americans. Given the dissention to affirmative action by prominent African American scholars such as Ward Connerly and with the American Civil Rights Institute’s crusade to ban Affirmative Action across the country ( Carter, 1991 ; Steele, 1990 ), it would be erroneous to assume attitude homogeneity. Therefore, examination of institutional factors such as school environment may help explain the differences in endorsement of affirmative action for African Americans.

School racial composition

For many years, researchers have explored the experiences of African Americans at predominately White institutions (PWIs) ( Allen, 1992 ; Lewis et al., 2004 ; Pillay, 2005 ). Fewer studies have examined the experiences of students at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). The majority of African Americans, around 68–82%, choose to attend PWIs ( Keller, 1988 ; Smith, 1991 ), which likely explains why research on these campuses is more prevalent. However, it is important to study African Americans in both of these environments as it may reveal how school racial composition may affect student attitudes on affirmative action.

There exists a longstanding debate in the literature about how college racial composition affects African American students. Although several studies have compared Black students at PWIs and HBCUs, the findings have been mixed. Some researchers report that Black students at HBCUs are better adjusted than their PWI counterparts ( Brown et al., 2001 ; Cheatham et al., 1990 ; Fleming, 1984 ; Greer & Brown, 2011 ), while other studies have failed to find evidence that HBCUs are more beneficial for African American students and have found no differences by school type ( Bohr et al., 1995 ; Cheatham et al., 1990 ; Kimbrough et al., 1996 ).

HBCUs were established to allow African Americans to educate themselves when they could not attend colleges that were reserved for members of the White, upper class ( Brown et al., 2001 ). Therefore, HBCUs were designed specifically with the well-being of African American students in mind, with the goals of preparation and empowerment for success in society ( Brown et al., 2001 ). Although fewer Black students attend HBCUs than PWIs, a disproportionate amount of degrees awarded to Black people are from HBCUs, suggesting that HBCUs tend to have better retention rates ( Gordon et al., 2020 ; Rodgers & Summers, 2008 ). Many researchers argue that HBCUs provide an environment of social support that helps students to flourish. Black students at HBCUs tend to have higher levels of academic engagement than their PWI counterparts ( Allen, 1992 ; Nelson Laird et al., 2007 ; Reeder & Schmitt, 2013 ), more positive student–faculty relationships ( Cokley, 2002 ), and more opportunities to be integrated into the campus community than Black students at PWIs ( Davis, 1991 ). While African-American students at HBCUs are less likely to experience racial discrimination on campus, students still must navigate prejudicial colorist attitudes ( Gasman & Abiola, 2016 ) and elitism borne from from the black bourgeoisie ‘respectability’ values and politics ( Cooper, 2017 ; Spencer, 2018 ; Young & Tsemo, 2011 ).

At PWIs, African Americans may be subjected to discrimination and racism. Many researchers have found that PWIs are less sensitive to the needs of Black students ( Brown et al., 2001 ; Keller, 1988 ). Some authors have argued that PWIs cannot provide the same levels of social support as HBCUs, which has been found to be an important variable for successful college adjustment. Black students at PWIs experience more alienation ( Steward et al., 1990 ; Winkle-Wagner & McCoy, 2018 ) and report lower social support than their HBCU counterparts ( Davis, 1991 ; Negga et al., 2007 ). Black students at PWIs have also been found to endorse higher levels of acculturative stress ( Joiner & Walker, 2002 ), discrimination and racism ( Brown et al., 2001 ), stereotyped treatment ( Allen, 1992 ) and race-related stress ( Neville et al., 2004 ).

To the authors’ knowledge, there are currently no studies that have investigated affirmative action attitudes at a HBCU, and only a handful of studies have focused on affirmative action attitudes of African American students at PWIs ( Aberson, 2007 ; Antwi-Boasiako & Asagba, 2005 ). Therefore, this study will contribute to the literature by addressing this gap in research. Antwi-Boasiako and Asagba (2005) found that the majority of African Americans at a PWI believed that race should be considered as a factor in college admission, although many felt that affirmative action discriminates against White students. Therefore, Black students at PWIs may be more likely to endorse more favorable attitudes towards affirmative action because they likely experience discrimination more frequently in the university context than Black students at HBCUs. On the other hand, one might expect HBCU students to endorse favorable attitudes towards affirmative action. If Black students receive an education that focuses on empowering them to succeed in a racist society, then societal inequities may be more salient, which could lead to stronger endorsement of affirmative action.

African American racial identity

In addition to the school environment, individual level factors related to identity may also impact attitudes toward affirmative action policies. Racial identity for African Americans serves as a lens through which meaning and significance are attached to racial experiences and being Black ( Cross, 1995 ; Sellers et al., 1998 ). One conceptualization of racial identity is the Multidimensional Model of Racial Identity (MMRI) by Sellers and colleagues (1997) . It posits an integrated framework of four dimensions that describe the meaning and significance of race with respect to the African American self-concept ( Sellers et al., 1998 ). There is not any endorsement of any particular definition of what it means to be Black, rather the emphasis is placed on the individual’s self-perception ( Sellers et al., 1998 ). The four dimensions include identity salience, race centrality, racial ideology, and the regard in which the individual holds about their own group. Racial salience refers to the extent that an individual’s race is an important part of their African American identity for the duration of a specific situation or event. The level of analysis is the particular situation or event. Race centrality refers to the extent to which an individual views race as a core part of his or her self-concept. This dimension is believed to be stable and non-situational. The third dimension, racial ideology, refers to the meaning that an individual attributes to being Black. Ideology includes values, characteristics, and attributes that the particular individual associates with Blackness. Four racial ideologies were hypothesized, which include the following: nationalist, oppressed minority, assimilation, and humanist. The nationalist ideology focuses on the distinctiveness of being Black. An individual with this ideology views the African American experience as being highly unique and different from any other social group. Nationalists believe that African Americans should be in control of their own fate and not seek input from non-Blacks. The oppressed minority ideology concentrates on the similarities of experiences between Blacks and other oppressed groups. A person who adopts an assimilationist ideology stresses the similarities between African Americans and the remainder of American society. This individual thinks of him or herself as an American and as a result attempts to be a part of mainstream society. A person espousing a humanist ideology emphasizes the similarities among all humans. The issues these individuals are concerned with center around broader concerns that face all humans (e.g. poverty, the environment, global politics). Lastly, racial regard signifies an individual’s affective and evaluative judgment of his or her racial group ( Sellers, Smith, et al., 1998 ). Sellers and colleagues delineate two types of regard – private and public. Private regard refers to how Blacks feel about other Blacks and being Black. Finally, public regard refers to the individual’s perception of what society thinks and feels about their group.

Racial identity and school type

The impact of racial identity has been examined alongside a number of different psychological variables ranging from drug attitudes ( Townsend & Belgrave, 2000 ), to academic achievement ( Awad, 2007 ). Researchers have also examined differences in racial identity at PWIs and HBCUs. Despite the common assumption that HBCUs offer more opportunities for cultural awareness and development, Cheatham et al. (1990) found that Black students at HBCUs did not report more developed levels of racial identity than Black students at PWIs. Their findings were corroborated by Cokley (1999) , who also found no differences in the importance of racial identity in his comparison of HBCUs and PWIs. However, institutional differences in racial identity attitudes were found where students from PWCUs endorsed higher assimilationist and humanist attitudes while HBCU students endorsed higher nationalist attitudes. Gilbert et al. (2006) also found that their HBCU sample endorsed high levels of racial pride. Anglin and Wade (2007) did not find any differences related to school racial composition. However, for both Black students at a PWI and Black students attending a racially diverse college, an internalized multicultural racial identity was associated with better college adjustment.

Affirmative action and college students

Research suggests that the formation of strong political attitudes remains somewhat fluid during young adulthood ( Alwin et al., 1991 ), particularly for racially and ethnically minoritized students ( Sidanius et al., 2008 ). However, once these political attitudes solidify, they are quite enduring into adulthood ( Alwin et al., 1991 ; Sears & Funk, 1999 ). Specifically, research has shown that affirmative action attitudes can evolve over the course of one’s college experience ( Park, 2009 ; Sidanius et al., 2008 ), suggesting that, among other factors, exposure to the liberal norms of one’s institution has the potential to influence attitudes toward policies that champion initiatives such as affirmative action. These findings suggest that the college years can be an impressionable time period for students, leading to the formation and crystallization of a new belief system and set of attitudes. Furthermore, it would behoove policymakers to analyze the attitudes towards affirmative action by college students as the majority represent the next generation of voters ( Park, 2009 ). Further, as previous research has demonstrated, college students’ political orientations and attitudes not only vary by ethnicity, but also as a function of time ( Park, 2009 ; Sidanius et al., 2008 ) and peer group exposure ( Astin, 1991 ). Therefore, it appears that stakeholders crafting policies on issues such as affirmative action would benefit from an understanding of the potential effect of the formative years of college on citizens as it is often a time for identity exploration and attitudes are the most pliable ( Gurin et al., 2002 ).

The purpose of the present study was to investigate variables that predict affirmative action attitudes in African Americans, specifically racial identity and school type. To the authors’ knowledge, no studies have compared affirmative action attitudes of Black students at PWIs and HBCUs in the United States. Another major aim of the study is to examine whether racial identity will interact with school racial composition to predict affirmative action attitudes. To gain a deeper understanding of African American college student’s attitudes towards affirmative action, research needs to move beyond demographic indicators and explore specific identity attributes and educational contexts.

Survey instruments

Participants were recruited from introductory psychology classes at either a predominately White, Midwestern state university (n = 58) or at a historically Black, Southern state university (n = 119). After obtaining informed consent for their participation, students anonymously completed questionnaire packets. Three survey instruments were used—one to assess racial identity, one to assess attitudes toward affirmative action, and a demographic questionnaire. Only those who self-identified as African-American on the demographic questionnaire were included in this study. This study was approved by the institutional review board for human subjects at both universities.

Multidimensional Inventory of Black Identity (MIBI; Sellers et al., 1997 ) was originally developed to measure racial identity according to the Multidimensional Model of Racial Identity (MMRI), which assumes race to be one of several relevant identities with varied significance and meaning. The model proposes that four dimensions characterize racial identity—centrality, ideology, regard, and salience. The MIBI attempts to measure only the three situation-stable dimensions of centrality, ideology, and regard. The original measure contains 56 questions divided into seven subscales: Centrality, Nationalistic Ideology, Oppressed Minority Ideology, Assimilationist Ideology, Humanist Ideology, Private Regard, and Public Regard. Sample items include ‘Being Black is an important reflection of who I am,’ ‘Blacks should strive to be full members of the American political system,’ and ‘Blacks and Whites can never live in true harmony because of racial differences.’ Responses are on a seven-point Likert-type scale ranging from (1) strongly disagree to (7) strongly agree. Sellers et al. (1997) found coefficient alphas of .77 for Centrality, .60 for Private Regard, .79 for Nationalist Ideology, .76 for Oppressed Minority, .73 for Assimilationist Ideology, and .70 for Humanist Ideology subscales. However, the Public Regard subscale was not found to be internally consistent and was dropped, creating the 51-item, six subscale measure that was used in this study. Sellers et al. (1997) also found construct and predictive validity for the measure with predicted correlations between the subscales as well as with self-reported race-related behaviors. Further support for the reliability and validity of the MIBI was found by Cokley and Helm (2001) .

Attitudes Toward Affirmative Action Scale (ATAAS; Kravitz & Platania, 1993 ) is a six-question attitude scale designed to measure general affirmative action attitudes toward a specific group. Sample items include ‘Affirmative action is a good policy’ and ‘I would be willing to work at an organization with an affirmative action plan.’ The 5-point Likert-type answers range from (1) strongly disagree to (5) strongly agree. The initial Cronbach’s alpha was reported to be .86 ( Kravitz & Platania, 1993 ) based on participation from Black college students while a more racially diverse college-age sample reported a Cronbach’s alpha of .92 ( Kravitz et al., 2000 ).

Demographic Questionnaire.

In the demographic questionnaire, participants indicated their age, year in school, sex, race, and socio-economic status.

Participants and procedures

A total of 32 freshmen, 70 sophomores, 50 juniors, and 25 seniors completed questionnaire packets with females comprising 68% of the total respondents. The mean age was 20.8 years old with an age range from 17 to 51 years old. The majority of the sample, 52.5%, self-reported their family’s socioeconomic status as middle class, with 30.5% as working class and the remainder upper middle and upper class. In terms of institutional characteristics, the racial composition of the student body at the PWI consisted of participants that identified as 73% White, 15% African American, 3% Latinx and 2% Asian American ( Campus Explorer, 2010 ). The average undergraduate enrollment at the PWI was approximately 16,700 ( Campus Explorer, 2010 ). For the HBU the racial composition consisted of 95% African American, 4% White, and 1% listed ‘other.’ The average enrollment for this university was 6,700 undergraduates ( Campus Explorer, 2010 ).

After generating sample demographics, we found correlations between school composition, self-identified sex, racial identity, and affirmative action attitudes. We found no significant differences between the samples on level of SES therefore it was not included in the analyses. We followed correlations with one-way ANOVAs to test for main effects and then a series of 2×2 ANOVAs to test for interactions. Finally, we used hierarchical regressions, also known as sequential regressions, to test which of our variables are important influences on attitudes toward affirmative action.

Hierarchical regressions allow us to determine if new variables, such as racial identity, helps improve the prediction of outcome variables, such as affirmative action attitudes, over and above an existing set of variables ( Tabachnick & Fidell, 2007 ). Hierarchical regression allows variables to be entered in blocks or steps based on an underlying causal model ( Tabachnick & Fidell, 2007 ). Our independent variables were school type (HBCU and PWI), self-identified sex (female & male), and the six racial identity subscales (race centrality, private regard, nationalist, oppressed minority, assimilationist, and humanistic). School type and self-identified sex were entered in the first step of the regression as these factors were hypothesized based on the literature review to influence the racial identity dimensions as well as the outcome variable, attitudes toward affirmative action. Entering these variables in a first step also allows for an estimate of the total effects of these variables on the outcome, including through indirect effects on variables entered in later steps ( Tabachnick & Fidell, 2007 ). By entering the racial identity subscales in the second step of the analysis, we are then also able to determine if these variables are able to explain a statistically significant amount of variance above and beyond the variance accounted for by school type and gender.

The purpose of this research was to determine whether self-identified sex, school composition, and racial identity dimensions impact college students’ affirmative action attitudes. Correlations among the study variables are displayed in Table 1 . Most notably, there was a significant negative correlation between affirmative action attitudes and school type ( r = −.245, p < .01), where those attending the HBCU were less likely to endorse affirmative action than those attending the PWI. In addition, there was a significant positive correlation between affirmative action attitudes and assimilation ( r = .151, p < .05), a significant positive correlation between affirmative action attitudes and oppressed minority ( r = .136, p < .05), and a significant positive correlation between affirmative action attitudes and centrality ( r = .192, p < .01). Specifically, students who endorsed assimilationist attitudes, oppressed minority attitudes, and felt that race was more central to their self-concept were more likely to endorse affirmative action than others.

Intercorrelations between the ATAAS, School Type, Sex, and MIBI Scales.

A one-way between subjects analysis of variance (ANOVA) indicated a significant main effect for school type, F (1,172) = 10.46, p < .01, and for racial centrality, F (1,172) = 5.95, p < .05. However, in the 2×2 ANOVAs to test for interaction, no significant interactions emerged between school type and self-identified sex or between school type and any of the racial identity dimensions, including centrality. This finding of a main effect but lack of interaction effects indicates that school type has the same effect on affirmative action attitudes for both males and females. Students of both sexes attending HBCUs were less likely to endorse affirmative action attitudes than students at PWIs. Also, those students who scored high on racial centrality, regardless of school type, were more likely to endorse affirmative action attitudes.

A hierarchical multiple regression analysis was performed to determine the extent that racial identity dimensions predicts affirmative action attitudes. Students’ affirmative action attitudes were regressed on self-identified sex, school composition (HBU or PWI), and racial identity dimensions including centrality, private regard, assimilation, humanist, oppressed minority, and nationalist. Table 2 provides a summary of the hierarchical regression analysis. The first predictors entered in the regression, self-identified sex and school type, resulted in a statistically significant model, F (2,174) = 5.54, p < .01. A statistically significant increase in affirmative action attitudes emerged. Self-identified sex and school type accounted for 6% of the variance in affirmative action attitudes. Further examination of standardized coefficients indicates that school type is a powerful influence on affirmative action attitudes ( b = −.242, t [174] = −3.312, p = .001). According to this finding, students attending HBCUs are less likely to endorse affirmative action attitudes than students attending PWCUs. This analysis is in agreement with the earlier ANOVAs.

Hierarchical Regression Analysis of Predictors of Affirmative Action Attitudes

The second model, in which racial identity dimensions were entered into the second step in the regression equation, also resulted in a statistically significant model, F (8, 168) = 3.15, p < .01. A statistically significant increase in students’ affirmative action attitudes emerged. The racial identity dimensions accounted for an additional 7.1% of the variance in affirmative action attitudes. The entire model, accounting for 13% of the variance in attitudes, is a moderate effect size ( Tabachnick & Fidell, 2007 ). An examination of racial identity dimension coefficients indicates that after controlling for school type and sex, race centrality was the only racial identity domain that had a statistically significant impact on affirmative action attitudes (β = .190, t [168] = 2.227, p = .027). This finding indicates that when race is a central part of students’ identity, students are more likely to endorse affirmative action. However, other aspects of racial identity, such as ideology or private regard, had no such effect.

In the current study, the only significant predictors of affirmative action attitudes were school racial composition and the racial identity status of centrality. Black students at the PWI were more likely to endorse favorable attitudes towards affirmative action than their HBCU counterparts. This may be attributed to the increased salience of being a racially or ethnically minoritized student at a PWI. In the relative homogeneity of HBCUs, Black students may feel less of a need for affirmative action. As mentioned previously, Black students at HBCUs have reported feeling a stronger sense of belonging and connection ( Allen, 1992 ; Chavous, Harris, Rivas, Helaire, & Green, 2004 ), that their needs are reflected in extracurricular activities, and that they are supported by faculty ( Allen, 1992 ; Brown et al., 2001 ; Cokley, 2002 ). This supportive environment may decrease the perception that affirmative action is necessary. Black students at HBCUs may have fewer opportunities to experience discrimination and racial stereotypes and the social support systems available at HBCUs may help students cope with racism when it is experienced ( Gilbert et al., 2006 ).

In contrast, Black students at PWIs tend to encounter discrimination, stereotypes, and racism on a more regular basis ( Brown et al., 2001 ), which can make students feel that affirmative action policies or programs are necessary to ensure fair treatment. In addition, in the more racially homogenous environment of an HBCU, interracial competition may be less pronounced than in a PWI. In a PWI, both Black and White students may apply for the same positions in student organizations, internships, and scholarships, which may further increase the salience of affirmative action policies.

HBCU students may also be less likely to endorse affirmative action as they are focused on uplifting and supporting the Black community rather than finding ways to integrate into the White mainstream culture. That is, instead of ensuring fair treatment in White-dominated workplaces, more energy may be devoted to establishing successful Black organizations and businesses. While the results of the present study found no significant differences in nationalist racial ideology scores between the two institutions, other researchers have found that HBCU students are more likely to endorse nationalist attitudes compared to students in PWIs ( Cokley, 1999 ).

There were no institutional differences between students at PWIs and students at HBCUs in terms of importance of racial identity or centrality. These findings are consistent with those of Cokley (1999) who found no institutional differences in levels of centrality between HBCUs and PWIs. These findings also corroborate those of Schmermund et al. (2001) , who found that centrality was the most important predictor for affirmative action attitudes, though Schmermund et al. (2001) did not specify the racial compositions of the five schools that they examined. This study therefore extends those findings by finding similar relationships between centrality and affirmative action attitudes in both a PWI and HBCU. Although it may seem intuitive that African American students who have high centrality scores may be more likely to choose to attend an HBCU, the results of the current study suggest otherwise. Specifically, race centrality scores were equally variable at both the HBCU and PWI. Therefore, the reasons students may have for choosing to attend PWIs and HBCUs are more complex than racial identity alone. Accordingly, it is logical that there was a main effect of racial centrality on affirmative action attitudes found in the current study. Regardless of school type, students who endorse centrality attitudes are more likely to endorse positive attitudes towards affirmative action. Schmermund and colleagues (2001) argue that the more identified one is with one’s group, the more one will endorse policies that promote the group’s interest. Individuals who define themselves by their race may be more likely to believe there is a need for affirmative action.

Limitations of study and future research directions

There are limitations in this study to be considered. As the current sample consists of mostly university psychology students recruited from a Midwestern predominantly White institution (PWI) and a Southern historically Black college and university (HBCU), it limits the generalizability of these findings only to these specific regional areas and possibly these schools. Additionally, while affirmative action remains federal law the nature and implementation of affirmative action programs in education may vary from state to state, based upon legislative precedent.

It is also interesting to note that none of the ideology scales significantly predicted affirmative action attitudes, although it has been found that these racial identity attitudes vary by school racial composition ( Cokley, 1999 ; Gilbert et al., 2006 ). It is possible that differences in racial identity across school type depend on the construct being examined. One must exercise caution when generalizing research findings and making assumptions on the basis of school type alone, as school environments may interact with different variables in unique ways. However, we offer some possible explanations for the lack of significant findings in our study.

One reason for centrality being the only dimension of racial identity that emerged as significant may be that the subcategories of ideology are not mutually exclusive. That is, a given individual may partially endorse aspects of each ideology, rather than cleanly falling into one category or the other. Schmermund et al. (2001) note that people may hold different philosophies regarding racial identity that varies with situational or contextual factors. For example, a person may endorse humanist attitudes socially and date interracially while at the same time is an active member of an ethnic specific organization or club. While the focus of our study was on affirmative action, the MIBI ideology subscales consist of items that range widely in domain, such as social relationships, politics, morals, and spirituality. Therefore, a racial identity measure that focuses more narrowly on political attitudes would likely significantly predict affirmative action attitudes.

Despite the limitations, the current study significantly contributes to the understanding of African American’s endorsement of Affirmative Action attitudes. Given that African Americans are one of the groups that benefit from Affirmative Action, it is important to determine the factors that contribute to their endorsement of the policy. Policymakers should understand the attitudes towards affirmative action by college students as the majority represent the next generation of voters ( Park, 2009 ). Educational workshops about Affirmative Action may be tailored to African American students based on whether they are at an HBCU or PWI. Administrators at HBCUs may want to concentrate on the discrimination that is still present in the workforce and help HBCU students understand the importance and continued necessity of the policy. Further, higher education administrators, scholars, and others may be able to increase their understanding of the variability in African Americans’ Affirmative Action attitudes. Until equality among all groups is reached, Affirmative action programs will continue to be necessary. It is important to educate all groups about the benefits of diversity including those who are among the beneficiaries.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Affirmative Action and University Fit: Evidence from Proposition 209

Proposition 209 banned the use of racial preferences in admissions at public colleges in California. We analyze unique data for all applicants and enrollees within the University of California (UC) system before and after Prop 209. After Prop 209, graduation rates increased by 4.4%. We present evidence that certain institutions are better at graduating more-prepared students while other institutions are better at graduating less-prepared students and that these matching effects are particularly important for the bottom tail of the qualification distribution. We find that Prop 209 led to a more efficient sorting of minority students, explaining 18% of the graduation rate increase in our preferred specification. Further, universities appear to have responded to Prop 209 by investing more in their students, explaining between 23-64% of the graduation rate increase.

The individual-level data on applicants to University of California campuses used in this paper was provided by the University of California Office of the President (UCOP) in response to a data request submitted by Professors Richard Sander (UCLA) and V. Joseph Hotz, while Hotz was a member of the UCLA faculty. We thank Samuel Agronow, Deputy Director of Institutional Research, UCOP, for his assistance in fulfilling this request and to Jane Yakowitz for her assistance in overseeing this process. Peter Arcidiacono and Esteban Aucejo acknowledge financial support from Project SEAPHE. We thank Kate Antonovics, Chun-Hui Miao, Kaivan Munshi, Justine Hastings, Peter Kuhn, Jesse Rothstein, David Card, Enrico Moretti, David Lam and seminar participants at Brown, IZA and UC Berkeley for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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Affirmative action and university fit: evidence from Proposition 209 Peter Arcidiacono12*, Esteban Aucejo3, Patrick Coate4 and V Joseph Hotz125 * Corresponding author: Peter Arcidiacono [email protected] Author Affiliations For all author emails, please log on. IZA Journal of Labor Economics 2014, 3:7 doi:10.1186/2193-8997-3-7 Published: 15 September 2014

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Are Minority Students Harmed by Affirmative Action?

Subscribe to the brown center on education policy newsletter, matthew m. chingos matthew m. chingos former brookings expert, senior fellow, director of education policy program - urban institute.

March 7, 2013

Affirmative action is back in the news this year with a major Supreme Court case, Fisher v. Texas. The question before the Court is whether the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause permits the University of Texas at Austin’s use of race in its undergraduate admissions process. The Court may declare the use of racial preferences in university admissions unconstitutional when it decides the case in the coming months, potentially overturning its decision in the landmark Grutter case decided a decade ago.

Accompanying the general subject of affirmative action in the spotlight is the “mismatch” hypothesis, which posits that minority students are harmed by the very policies designed to help them. Justice Clarence Thomas made this argument in his dissent in the Grutter case: “The Law School tantalizes unprepared students with the promise of a University of Michigan degree and all of the opportunities that it offers. These overmatched students take the bait, only to find that they cannot succeed in the cauldron of competition. And this mismatch crisis is not restricted to elite institutions.”

The mismatch idea is certainly plausible in theory. One would not expect a barely literate high-school dropout to be successful at a selective college; admitting that student to such an institution could cause them to end up deep in debt with no degree. But admissions officers at selective colleges obviously do not use affirmative action to admit just anyone, but rather candidates they think can succeed at their institution.

The mismatch hypothesis is thus an empirical question: have admissions offices systematically overstepped in their zeal to recruit a diverse student body? In other words, are they admitting students who would be better off if they had gone to college elsewhere, or not at all? There is very little high-quality evidence supporting the mismatch hypothesis, especially as it relates to undergraduate admissions—the subject of the current Supreme Court case.

In fact, most of the research on the mismatch question points in the opposite direction. In our 2009 book , William Bowen, Michael McPherson, and I found that students were most likely to graduate by attending the most selective institution that would admit them. This finding held regardless of student characteristics—better or worse prepared, black or white, rich or poor. Most troubling was the fact that many well-prepared students “undermatch” by going to a school that is not demanding enough, and are less likely to graduate as a result. Other prior research has found that disadvantaged students benefit more from attending a higher quality college than their more advantaged peers.

A November 2012 NBER working paper by a team of economists from Duke University comes to the opposite conclusion in finding that California’s Proposition 209, a voter-initiated ban on affirmative action passed in 1996, led to improved “fit” between minority students and colleges in the University of California system, which resulted in improved graduation rates. The authors report a 4.4-percentage-point increase in the graduation rates of minority students after Proposition 209, 20 percent of which they attribute to better matching.

At first glance, these results appear to contradict earlier work on the relationship between institutional selectivity and student outcomes. But the paper’s findings rest on a questionable set of assumptions, and a more straightforward reanalysis of the data used in the paper, which were provided to me by the University of California President’s Office (UCOP), yields findings that are not consistent with the mismatch hypothesis.

First, the NBER paper uses data on the change in outcomes between the three years prior to Prop 209’s passage (1995-1997) and the three years afterward (1998-2000) to estimate the effect of the affirmative action ban on student outcomes. Such an analysis is inappropriate because it cannot account for other changes occurring in California over this time period (other than simple adjustments for changes in student characteristics).

A key problem with the before-and-after method is that it does not take into account pre-existing trends in student outcomes. This is readily apparent in Figure 1, which shows that the graduation rates of underrepresented minority (URM) students increased by about four percentage points between 1992-1994 and 1995-1997, before the affirmative action ban. The change from 1995-1997 to 1998-2000 was smaller, at about three percentage points. The NBER paper interprets this latter change as the causal impact of Prop 209, but this analysis assumes that there would have been no change in the absence of Prop 209. If the prior trend had continued, then graduation rates would have increased another four points—in which case, the effect of Prop 209 was to decrease URM graduation rates by one percentage point.

Adjusting for student characteristics does not change this general pattern. The adjustment makes no difference in the pre-Prop 209 period, but explains about 36 percent of the increase in the immediate post-Prop 209 period (which is consistent with the NBER paper’s finding that changes in student characteristics explain 34-50 percent of the change). But if the 1992-1994 to 1995-1997 adjusted change was four points, and the 1995-1997 to 1998-2000 adjusted change was one point, then Prop 209 might be said to have a negative effect of three percentage points.

None of these alternative analyses of the effect of Prop 209 should be taken too seriously, because it is difficult to accurately estimate a pre-policy trend from only two data points. The bottom line is that there probably isn’t any way to persuasively estimate the effect of Prop 209 using these data. But this analysis shows how misleading it is in this case to only examine the 1995-1997 to 1998-2000 change, while ignoring the prior trend.

Second, the NBER paper finds that less-selective universities produce better outcomes among minority students with weaker academic credentials. This must be the case in order for “mismatch” to exist, but it runs counter to most prior research on the subject. The one exception is a 2002 study by Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger, which found no impact of college selectivity on earnings except among students from low-income families. However, the methodology of the Dale-Krueger study severely limits the relevance of its results for students and policymakers.

In order to control for unobserved student characteristics, Dale-Krueger control for information about the institutions to which students applied and were accepted. This takes into account potentially valuable information that is observable by admissions committees but not the researcher. But it is problematic because it produces results that are based on comparisons between students who attended more or less selective colleges despite being admitted to the same set of institutions. As Caroline Hoxby explains : “since at least 90 percent of students who [were admitted to a similar group of schools] choose the more selective college(s) within it, the strategy generates estimates that rely entirely on the small share of students who make what is a very odd choice.” In other words, the method ignores most of the variation in where students go to college, which results from decisions about where to apply.

The problem with the NBER paper is that it uses a variant of the Dale-Krueger method by controlling for which UC campuses students applied to and were admitted by. And the UCOP data are consistent with Hoxby’s argument: in 1995-1997, 69 percent of URM students attended the most selective UC campus to which they were admitted and 90 percent attended a campus with an average SAT score within 100 points of the most selective campus that admitted them (the corresponding figures for all UC students are 72 and 93 percent).

A more straightforward analysis is to compare the graduation rates of URM students with similar academic preparation and family backgrounds who attended different schools. The mismatch hypothesis predicts that URM students with weak qualifications will be more likely to graduate, on average, from a less selective school than a more selective one.

The data show the opposite of what mismatch theory predicts: URM students, including those with less-than-stellar academic credentials, are more likely to graduate from more selective institutions. I calculate graduation rates by individual campus that are adjusted to take into account SAT scores, high school GPA, parental education, and family income. [1] I restrict this analysis to URM students with SAT scores in the 900-990 and 1000-1090 range during the three years before Prop 209, which should be exactly the group and time period when mismatch is most likely to occur.

Figure 2 shows that for both of the low-scoring groups of URM students, graduation rates are higher at more selective institutions. Results for individual institutions vary somewhat, but the upward trend in Figure 2 is clear. I find a similar pattern of results in the period after Prop 209 was passed (not shown). The main limitation of this type of analysis is that it does not take into account unobserved factors such as student motivation that may be associated with admission decisions and student choice of institution. The Dale-Krueger method is meant to address this issue, but for the reasons explained above produces results that are not particularly informative.

A better solution is to find instances of students who attended institutions of differing selectivity for reasons unrelated to their likelihood of success. This is not possible with the UCOP data, but such quasi-experimental methods are used in two other studies that finds a positive relationship between selectivity and student outcomes. In a study published in 2009, Mark Hoekstra used a cutoff in the admissions process at a flagship state university to estimate the impact of attending that university on earnings. This strategy eliminates bias by comparing students who are very similar except that some were just above the cutoff for admission and others were just below. Hoekstra finds that attending the flagship increased earnings by 20 percent for white men.

In a more recent working paper , Sarah Cohodes and Joshua Goodman employed a cutoff-based approach to measure the effect of a Massachusetts scholarship that could only be used at in-state institutions. Students who won the scholarship were more likely to attend a lower quality college, which caused a 40 percent decrease in on-time graduation rates, as well as a decline in the chances of earning a degree at any point within six years.

These two studies do not directly address the mismatch question because they do not focus on the beneficiaries of affirmative action, but they show that taking into account students’ unobserved characteristics leaves intact the positive relationship between selectivity and student outcomes that has been consistently documented in the many prior studies that are less causally persuasive.

To truly put the mismatch theory to rest, rigorous quasi-experimental evidence that focuses on the beneficiaries of preferential admissions policies is needed. But the current weight of the evidence leans strongly against the mismatch hypothesis. Most importantly, not a single credible study has found evidence that students are harmed by attending a more selective college. There may well be reasons to abolish or reform affirmative action policies, but the possibility that they harm the intended beneficiaries should not be among them.

[1] Specifically, I estimate the coefficients on institutional dummy variables after including these control variables. For the controls I include dummy variables corresponding to the categories used in the UCOP data, as well as dummies identifying missing data on each variable so as not to lose any observations. The adjusted graduation rate for each institution is calculated as the difference in its coefficient estimate and Berkeley’s coefficient estimate plus Berkeley’s unadjusted graduation rate for the indicated group of students (i.e. Berkeley’s adjusted and unadjusted graduation rate are thus equal by construction).

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Affirmative action in university admissions: Research roundup

2013 roundup of recent studies and papers on affirmative action, admissions, campus diversity and racial attitudes at U.S. universities.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License .

by Alexandra Raphel, The Journalist's Resource December 9, 2015

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In April 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a Michigan constitutional amendment banning affirmative action policies in the state’s universities. The ruling follows up on Fisher v. University of Texas , a 2013 case in which the Court declined to make a comprehensive judgment on affirmative action, sending the case back to a lower court with instructions to apply “strict scrutiny” to the use of race in admissions.

The plaintiff in the 2013 case was Abigail Fisher, a white student who was denied admission to the University of Texas at Austin in 2008. Texas residents ranked at the top of their high school class (usually the top 10%) are eligible for automatic admission and fill 75% of the available in-state spots. Those who do not meet this qualification are admitted based on factors such as academic achievement, extracurricular activities, cultural background and race. Fisher, who was part of the second group, believed that she was denied admission because of her race, claiming that several of her non-white high school classmates were admitted despite having lower grades. Her legal team argued that this is a violation of the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 .

The United States District Court heard Fisher v. University of Texas in 2009 and ruled in favor of the university, as did the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in 2011. In February 2012 the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case and oral arguments took place in October 2012. The ruling in the case would technically only apply to public universities; but if the Court had ruled that affirmative action programs constitute racial discrimination, private universities would likely also be forbidden from using race in admission under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which forbids racial discrimination in all programs that receive federal funding. (For more on this case, you can read the official transcript of the oral arguments as well as consult the SCOTUSblog .)

The case is only the latest wrinkle in a decades-old legal battle: In the 1978 case University of California Regents v. Bakke , the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that some affirmative action admissions programs were constitutional, but that race-based quotas were not. In a famous pair of cases in 2003 — Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger — the Court affirmed the right of the University of Michigan Law School to consider race as part of a “holistic review” of an application. At the same time, the Court ruled that the school’s undergraduate process, which automatically awarded 20 points to minority applicants, was unconstitutional. In two 2007 cases, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 and Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education , the Court ruled against programs that sought to use race as a “tiebreaker” for admission to oversubscribed public schools.

Research has shown that diversity experiences at college can have positive effects for students’ civic growth and their healthy participation in a globalized world. But even if institutions of higher education only used family income, not race, as their chief criterion for diversity, many structural challenges would remain. High school students from low-income families of all races are less likely to apply to universities . A 2012 study from Stanford University and the Harvard Kennedy School found that the “vast majority of very high-achieving students who are low-income do not apply to any selective college or university.”

Below are several of the latest studies that examine some of the issues of affirmative action in university admissions and bias:

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“ Affirmative Action and the Quality-Fit Tradeoff” Arcidiacono, Peter; Lovenheim, Michael. National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, February 2015.

Summary:  “This paper reviews the literature on affirmative action in undergraduate education and law schools, focusing in particular on the tradeoff between the quality of an institution and the fit between a school and a student. We first discuss the conditions under which affirmative action for under-represented minorities (URM) could help or harm their educational outcomes. We then provide descriptive evidence on the extent of affirmative action in law schools, as well as a review of the contentious literature on how affirmative action affects URM student performance in law school. We present a simple selection model that we argue provides a useful framework for interpreting the disparate findings in this literature. The paper then turns to a similar discussion of affirmative action in undergraduate admissions, focusing on evidence of the extent of race-based admissions practices and the effect such preferences have on the quality of schools in which minority students enroll, graduation rates, college major and earnings. We pay much attention to the evidence from state-level bans on affirmative action and argue these bans are very informative about how affirmative action affects URM students. Finally, we discuss the evidence on “percent plans,” which several states have enacted in an attempt to replace affirmative action.”

“ Affirmative Action and Its Mythology “ Fryer Jr., Roland G.; Loury, Glenn C. National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, July 2005.

Summary:  “For more than three decades, critics and supporters of affirmative action have fought for the moral high ground — through ballot initiatives and lawsuits, in state legislatures, and in varied courts of public opinion. The goal of this paper is to show the clarifying power of economic reasoning to dispel some myths and misconceptions in the racial affirmative action debates. We enumerate seven commonly held (but mistaken) views one often encounters in the folklore about affirmative action (affirmative action may involve goals and timelines, but definitely not quotas, e.g.). Simple economic arguments reveal these seven views to be more myth than fact.”

“Is There a ‘Workable’ Race-Neutral Alternative to Affirmative Action in College Admissions?” Long, Mark C. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management , 2014. doi: 10.1002/pam.21800.

Abstract: “The 2013 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in the Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin case clarified when and how it is legally permissible for universities to use an applicant’s race or ethnicity in its admissions decisions. The court concluded that such use is permissible when ‘no workable race-neutral alternatives would produce the educational benefits of diversity.’ This paper shows that replacing traditional affirmative action with a system that uses an applicant’s predicted likelihood of being an underrepresented racial minority as a proxy for the applicant’s actual minority status can yield an admitted class that has a lower predicted grade point average and likelihood of graduating than the class that would have been admitted using traditional affirmative action. This result suggests that race-neutral alternatives may not be ‘workable’ from the university’s perspective.”

“ Assessing the Potential Impact of a Nationwide Class-Based Affirmative Action System ” Xiang, Alice; Rubin, Donald B. Statistical Science,  2015, Vol. 30. doi: 10.1214/15-STS514.

Abstract:  “We examine the possible consequences of a change in law school admissions in the United States from an affirmative action system based on race to one based on socioeconomic class. Using data from the 1991–1996 Law School Admission Council Bar Passage Study, students were reassigned attendance by simulation to law school tiers by transferring the affirmative action advantage for black students to students from low socioeconomic backgrounds. The hypothetical academic outcomes for the students were then multiply-imputed to quantify the uncertainty of the resulting estimates. The analysis predicts dramatic decreases in the numbers of black students in top law school tiers, suggesting that class-based affirmative action is insufficient to maintain racial diversity in prestigious law schools. Furthermore, there appear to be no statistically significant changes in the graduation and bar passage rates of students in any demographic group. The results thus provide evidence that, other than increasing their representation in upper tiers, current affirmative action policies relative to a socioeconomic-based system neither substantially help nor harm minority academic outcomes, contradicting the predictions of the “mismatch” hypothesis, which asserts otherwise.”

“Affirmative Action Bans and the ‘Chilling Effect'” Antonovics, Kate L.; Sander, Richard H. American Law and Economics Review , 2013, doi: 10.1093/aler/ahs020.

Abstract: “This paper examines whether California’s Proposition 209, which led to the 1998 ban on the use of racial preferences in admissions at the University of California (UC) system, lowered the value that underrepresented minorities placed on attending UC schools. In particular, we look for evidence of a chilling effect in minority yield rates (the probability of enrolling in a UC school conditional on being accepted) after Proposition 209. Using individual-level data on every freshman applicant to the UC system from 1995 to 2000, we find no evidence that yield rates fell for minorities relative to other students after Proposition 209, even after controlling for changes in student characteristics and changes in the set of UC schools to which students were admitted. In fact, our analysis suggests Proposition 209 had a modest ‘warming effect.’ We investigate and rule out the possibility that this warming effect was driven by changes in the selection of students who applied to the UC, changes in financial aid or changes in minorities’ college opportunities outside the UC system. Instead, we present evidence consistent with the idea that Proposition 209 increased the signaling value of attending UC schools for minorities.”

“The Effects of Affirmative Action Bans on College Enrollment, Educational Attainment and the Demographic Composition of Universities” Hinrichs, Peter. Review of Economics and Statistics , August 2012, Vol. 94, No. 3. doi:10.1162/REST_a_00170.

Abstract: “I estimate the effects of affirmative action bans on college enrollment, educational attainment, and college demographic composition by exploiting time and state variation in bans. I find that bans have no effect on the typical student and the typical college, but they decrease underrepresented minority enrollment and increase white enrollment at selective colleges. In addition, I use the case study methods of Abadie and Gardeazabal (2003) and Abadie, Diamond, and Hainmueller (2010) and find that the affirmative action ban in California shifted underrepresented minority students from more selective campuses to less selective ones at the University of California.”

“A Comparative Analysis of Affirmative Action in the United Kingdom and United States” Archibong, Uduak; Sharps, Phyllis W. Journal of Psychological Issues in Organizational Cultures, July 2011 , Vol. 2, No. 2., 17-38. doi: 10.1002/jpoc.

Abstract: “Based on research conducted during a large-scale European Commission project on international perspectives on positive/affirmative action measures, the authors provide a comparative analysis of the legal context and perceptions of the impact of positive action in the United Kingdom and the United States. The study adopted participatory methods including consensus workshops, interviews, and legal analysis to obtain data from those individuals responsible for designing and implementing positive action measures. Findings are discussed, conclusions drawn, and wide-ranging recommendations are made at governmental and organizational levels. The authors conclude by suggesting possible implications for policy and argue for widespread awareness-raising campaigns of both the need for positive action measures for disadvantaged groups and the benefits of such measures for wider society. They also recommend the adoption of a more coherent and collaborative approach to the utilization and evaluation of the effectiveness of positive or affirmative action.”

“When White People Report Racial Discrimination: The Role of Region, Religion and Politics” Mayrl, Damon; Saperstein, Aliya. Social Science Research , December 2012. doi: 10.1016/j.ssresearch.2012.12.007.

Abstract: “Scholarly interest in the correlates and consequences of perceived discrimination has grown exponentially in recent years, yet, despite increased legal and media attention to claims of ‘anti-white bias,’ empirical studies predicting reports of racial discrimination by white Americans remain limited. Using data from the 2006 Portraits of American Life Study, we find that evangelical Protestantism increases the odds that whites will report experiencing racial discrimination, even after controlling for racial context and an array of social and psychological characteristics. However, this effect is limited to the South. Outside the South, political affiliation trumps religion, yielding distinct regional profiles of discrimination reporters. These findings suggest that institutions may function as regional ‘‘carriers’’ for whites inclined to report racial discrimination.

“Race and Affirming Opportunity in the Barack Obama Era” Wilson, William Julius. Du Bois Review , 2012, 9:1, 5-16. doi: 10.10170S1742058X12000240.

Abstract: “I first discuss the Obama administration’s efforts to promote racial diversity on college campuses in the face of recent court challenges to affirmative action. I then analyze opposition in this country to ‘racial preferences’ as a way to overcome inequality. I follow that with a discussion of why class-based affirmative action, as a response to cries from conservatives to abolish ‘racial preferences,’ would not be an adequate substitute for race-based affirmative action. Instead of class-based affirmative action, I present an argument for opportunity enhancing affirmative action programs that rely on flexible, merit-based criteria of evaluation as opposed to numerical guidelines or quotas. Using the term ‘affirmative opportunity’ to describe such programs, I illustrate their application with three cases: the University of California, Irvine’s revised affirmative action admissions procedure; the University of Michigan Law School’s affirmative action program, which was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2003; and the hiring and promotion of faculty of color at colleges and universities as seen in how I myself benefited from a type of affirmative action based on flexible merit-based criteria at the University of Chicago in the early 1970s. I conclude by relating affirmative opportunity programs for people of color to the important principle of ‘equality of life chances.'”

“Affirmative Meritocracy” Walton, Gregory M.; Spencer, Steven J.; Erman, Sam. Social Issues and Policy Review .

Abstract: “We argue that in important circumstances meritocracy can be realized only through a specific form of affirmative action we call affirmative meritocracy. These circumstances arise because common measures of academic performance systematically underestimate the intellectual ability and potential of members of negatively stereotyped groups (e.g., non-Asian ethnic minorities, women in quantitative fields). This bias results not from the content of performance measures but from common contexts in which performance measures are assessed — from psychological threats like stereotype threat that are pervasive in academic settings, and which undermine the performance of people from negatively stereotyped groups. To overcome this bias, school and work settings should be changed to reduce stereotype threat. In such environments, admitting or hiring more members of devalued groups would promote meritocracy, diversity, and organizational performance. Evidence for this bias, its causes, magnitude, remedies, and implications for social policy and for law are discussed.”

“The Marley Hypothesis: Denial of Racism Reflects Ignorance of History” Adams, Glenn; Nelson, Jessica C.; Salter, Phia S. Psychological Science , December 2012. doi: 10.1177/0956797612451466.

Abstract: “This study used a signal detection paradigm to explore the Marley hypothesis — that group differences in perception of racism reflect dominant-group denial of and ignorance about the extent of past racism. White American students from a midwestern university and black American students from two historically black universities completed surveys about their historical knowledge and perception of racism. Relative to black participants, White participants perceived less racism in both isolated incidents and systemic manifestations of racism. They also performed worse on a measure of historical knowledge (i.e., they did not discriminate historical fact from fiction), and this group difference in historical knowledge mediated the differences in perception of racism. Racial identity relevance moderated group differences in perception of systemic manifestations of racism (but not isolated incidents), such that group differences were stronger among participants who scored higher on a measure of racial identity relevance. The results help illuminate the importance of epistemologies of ignorance : cultural-psychological tools that afford denial of and inaction about injustice.”

“Racial Mismatch in the Classroom: Beyond Black-White Differences” McGrady, Patrick B.; Reynolds, John R. Sociology of Education , January 2013, Vol. 86, No. 1, 3-17. doi: 10.1177/0038040712444857.

Abstract: “Previous research demonstrates that students taught by teachers of the same race and ethnicity receive more positive behavioral evaluations than students taught by teachers of a different race/ethnicity. Many researchers view these findings as evidence that teachers, mainly white teachers, are racially biased due to preferences stemming from racial stereotypes that depict some groups as more academically oriented than others. Most of this research has been based on comparisons of only black and white students and teachers and does not directly test if other nonwhite students fare better when taught by nonwhite teachers. Analyses of Asian, black, Hispanic and white 10th graders in the 2002 Education Longitudinal Study confirm that the effects of mismatch often depend on the racial/ethnic statuses of both the teacher and the student, controlling for a variety of school and student characteristics. Among students with white teachers, Asian students are usually viewed more positively than white students, while black students are perceived more negatively. White teachers’ perceptions of Hispanic students do not typically differ from those of white students. Post-estimation comparisons of slopes indicate that Asian students benefit (perceptionwise) from having white teachers, but they reveal surprisingly few instances when black students would benefit (again, perceptionwise) from having more nonwhite teachers.”

“Beliefs About Affirmative Action: A Test of the Group Self-Interest and Racism Beliefs Models” Oh, Euna; Choi, Chun-Chung; Neville, Helen A.; Anderson, Carolyn J.; Landrum-Brown, Joycelyn. Journal of Diversity in Higher Education , 2010, Vol. 3, No. 3, 163-176. doi: 10.1037/a0019799.

Abstract: “Two models of affirmative action attitudes (i.e., group self-interest and racism beliefs) were examined among a sample of racially diverse college students. Open-ended questions were included to provide students an opportunity to elaborate on their beliefs about affirmative action and beliefs about the existence of racial discrimination. Findings from logistic regression analysis on a subsample ( n = 376) provide support for both models; race (a proxy for group self-interest) and racism beliefs (as measured by the Color-Blind Racial Attitudes Scale [CoBRAS] and an open-ended question) helped predict endorsement of affirmative action in theoretically expected ways. Asian, Latino and black students were more likely to view affirmative action as helpful compared to their white counterparts, and limited awareness of institutional racism (i.e., higher CoBRAS scores) was associated with antiaffirmative action arguments. Follow-up analysis, however, provided support for the superiority of the racism beliefs model as measured by the CoBRAS in predicting affirmative action beliefs over the group-interest model. Limitations and implications for future research are discussed.”

“What Lies Beneath Seemingly Positive Campus Climate Results: Institutional Sexism, Racism and Male Hostility Toward Equity Initiatives and Liberal Bias” Vaccaro, Annemarie. Equity & Excellence in Education , 2010, Vol. 43, No. 2, 202-215. doi: 10.1080/10665680903520231.

Introduction: “In an effort to make higher education institutions more welcoming spaces, many campuses engage in climate assessment. Campus climate study results can provide valuable insight into the state of a university and offer direction for climate improvements. This article offers a feminist analysis of climate data that emerged from the open-ended comment section on a campus climate survey. By using a critical feminist lens, the researcher uncovered ‘what lies beneath’ seemingly positive quantitative results. Qualitative results revealed male hostility toward diversity initiatives, resentment toward liberal bias, symbolic racism, and institutional sexism.”

Tags: research roundup, race-based admissions, racial preference, racial bias

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Alexandra Raphel

Is Affirmative Action Dead?

by CRCL | Apr 22, 2024 | Amicus , Blog | 0 comments

By Nathalie Beauchamps

Among the panoply of decisions that the Supreme Court has overturned or narrowed over the past few years, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard stands out. In the immediate aftermath of the decision, the burning question for those interested in or impacted by affirmative action was: what next? The lasting effects of this decision are worth discussing, not only on higher education admissions, but on school integration efforts, employer DEI efforts, and government-led affirmative action programs. Furthermore, supporters of affirmative action should think hard about what the longer-term role of affirmative action should be for addressing what is really a broader issue of remedying the lasting effects of systemic racism.

The SFFA suit was brought by a nonprofit called Students for Fair Admissions (“SFFA”), led by Edward Blum. SFFA argued that the admissions processes at Harvard College and University of North Carolina violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause by considering race as one of several factors. After applying a strict scrutiny test to the two university admissions programs, the Supreme Court agreed with SFFA. The Court conceded that maintaining diversity in higher education was a compelling state interest, reinforcing its prior holding in the landmark decision Grutter v. Bollinger . However, the Court did not agree that utilizing race as an explicit factor in admissions was narrowly tailored enough to pass constitutional muster. Strictly speaking, SFFA did not entirely overturn Grutter by banning outright the consideration of race in admissions—college admissions boards can still consider a student’s race if discussed in their admissions essays. Moreover, SFFA only legally applies within the higher education context: the plaintiffs sued under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination for institutions that receive federal funding. Thus, the direct legal impact of the decision is that any consideration of race as a discrete factor in college admissions is now unconstitutional.

SFFA ’s impact was immediate: higher education admissions boards have scrambled to find another way to maintain diversity at their schools. The admissions board at Harvard College , for one, adjusted its application promptly. Instead of asking for one longer essay in which students may or may not talk about their race, Harvard now requires five shorter essays, one of which encourages students to discuss how their experiences will contribute to the diversity of the school. Time will tell whether modified approaches such as this will yield similar demographic outcomes in the years to come.

It is less clear, however, how SFFA has or will change the number of “diverse” students enrolled in higher education. Prior to SFFA , affirmative action was primarily utilized by smaller and selective colleges —institutions that have already turned to utilizing applicant essays to evaluate the race of applicants. After SFFA , it may be difficult for large state schools to take a similar approach of evaluating essays, due to the many more applicants per cycle they have to evaluate. While several states had already banned affirmative action in public schools before SFFA was decided, for those remaining, it is hard to tell what the future of diversity at these schools will look like. A report by Zachary Bleemer , written after passage of Proposition 209 (a California ballot proposition that banned affirmative action in California public schools) offers one clue for a potential outcome. The report, evaluating longitudinal data from 1994 to 2002, found that banning affirmative action in California led to underrepresented minorities ending up in “lower-quality” colleges and universities, a decreased STEM degree attainment for underrepresented minority students, and a five percent annual decline in underrepresented minority graduates’ earnings between their mid-twenties to mid-thirties. If other large schools now take the same approach as the University of California system did, data suggests that SFFA could indeed leave a dark legacy.

Higher education is certainly not the only sector impacted by SFFA . Private employers have wondered how the decision might impact their own processes that evaluate race. Because the plaintiffs in SFFA sued under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 , which prohibits discrimination for institutions that receive federal funding, to the extent that private employers do not receive federal funding, they are safe from federal fiscal rescission. Nonetheless, private employers remain prohibited under Title VII from utilizing race as a factor in hiring. However, plaintiffs have begun arguing that certain DEI initiatives at private corporations, public corporations, and non-profits alike (e.g., diversity fellowship for intern applicants) violate the Civil Rights Act of 1866 which prohibits discrimination by any party in the making and enforcement of contracts. Just last summer, the American Alliance for Equal Rights (an organization led by SFFA founder Edward Blum), filed suit against Fearless Fund , a venture capital company run by and for women of color. The Alliance claimed that the Fearless Fund violated the Civil Rights Act by awarding grants to Black women-owned businesses. So far, the Eleventh Circuit has granted an injunction, halting Fearless from running its grant programs for the duration of the lawsuit. Companies have now noticeably begun adjusting their diversity programs to make them immune from similar suits (for example, some have made their diversity fellowships available to all applicants).

Educators have also wondered what SFFA might mean for school integration efforts. Notably, school districts do not have to change much of what they did before the SFFA decision due to prior case law. In Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 , the Supreme Court declined to extend its reasoning in Grutter that diversity is a compelling interest for school districts to desegregate their schools. Instead, the Court argued that diversity in higher education is distinct because it is not focused solely on race, but rather on “all factors that may contribute to student body diversity.” The Court has also formally recognized an interest in remedying the effects of past intentional discrimination. [1] Per Justice Kennedy’s guidance in his concurrence in Parents Involved , school boards have been able to promote school integration by working at the “general” rather than the “individual” level, such as redrawing school districts, relocating schools, and admitting students based on zip code as a proxy for race. Nonetheless, the lawsuits have continued, even challenging race-neutral school districting and admissions initiatives. The First Circuit , for one, just recently found in favor of three Boston schools that switched from a test-in admissions policy to one that considers applicants’ home zip codes, finding that this system did not violate the Constitution. There is no guarantee, however, that the Supreme Court will remain friendly to similar schemes that utilize race-neutral factors as proxies for race.

While the government itself also maintains affirmative action programs, these programs will likely remain untouched for the near-term future. First, United States military academies utilize affirmative action. The SFFA Court made an explicit exception within a footnote for these programs, allowing military academies to continue implementing affirmative action programs while citing the “distinct interests” of these schools. Second, the federal government, via Executive Order 11246 , requires federal contractors to abide by “affirmative action” requirements. These requirements are distinct from affirmative action in higher education because they set “placement goals” and encourage contractors to keep track of how many underrepresented minorities they employ; however, the government expressly forbids race to play a factor in hiring decisions or for contractors to utilize quotas to meet their goals.

The legacy of SFFA may be a moment for celebration for some, or a solemn reality for others. Regardless, while the status of affirmative action is in flux, it is more important than ever to reckon with the role affirmative action can or should play in the future to redress the impact of systemic racism.

If the legacy of SFFA turns out to look similar to the outcomes presented in Bleemer’s report on Proposition 209, litigators might consider prompting lower courts to re-evaluate their line of decisions that define an interest in remedying past intentional discrimination as compelling. The Supreme Court, in City of Richmond v. Croson , however, has set a high bar in this context, requiring an institution to demonstrate that it has itself intentionally discriminated against a group that purportedly benefits from its affirmative action program for there to be a compelling interest. Nonetheless, a goal of remedying historical injustices could still hold more weight in courts long term. When diversity itself is the impetus behind an affirmative action program, it is hard to justify why a student from one demographic should be “favored” over another. However, if affirmative action is positioned as part of a larger project to remedy historical injustices, this could present a more consistent moral justification for benefiting certain groups over others.

On the other hand, while affirmative action has been utilized to simply chip away at systemic injustices, it now finds itself on highly unstable ground. Consequently, this might lead litigators or advocates generally to question whether there is still any role for affirmative action within racial justice agendas. I believe there is—but within school desegregation efforts. A Brookings report argued recently that SFFA will likely not have a strong impact on college admissions, reasoning that Black and Latino students are overrepresented in two-year colleges where admissions are already not very competitive. This statistic, however, demonstrates a larger problem: racial educational disparities begin long before college. School districts in America remain highly segregated . And data shows that the achievement and earnings of Black students in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education improved significantly when compared to outcomes of these students before the landmark decision. Evidently, being in well-resourced schools at a young age can dictate one’s trajectory. Unfortunately, the days of court-ordered desegregation are largely behind us, and school districts hoping to find innovative ways to promote integration often receive large pushback from parents. This does not mean that we should give up combatting school segregation, which is alive and well seventy years after Brown —instead, this is an effort worth lobbying Congress for. In the wake of SFFA , school desegregation would likely do much more good than affirmative action in higher education ever could.

[1] See Freeman v. Pitts .

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‘Race Preferences at Work: How [Workplace Conditions] Shape White Americans’ Beliefs About Affirmative Action’

“This study examines how white Americans’ beliefs about affirmative action intersect with three important workplace factors: supervisory status (supervisors vs. subordinates), employment sector (public vs. private), and workplace racial composition. … Our analyses reveal declining opposition to affirmative action over time, though a majority of whites, regardless of authority level, still hold conservative stances on race-targeted policies. Further, results for our three key predictors (supervisory status, employment sector, workplace racial composition) provide support for group position, new governance, and intergroup contact theories, respectively.”

Find the paper and full list of authors at Sociological Focus.

‘Citizenship Privilege Harms Science’

‘an evolution of hashtags: a comparative analysis of hashtag usage following the deaths of michael brown and george floyd’, ‘engaged and reflexive sociology for environmental health’, ‘the apocalyptic nature of rivalry violence and the need for a new research agenda’, ‘the structure of racial identity: comparing non-hispanic white and black americans’, ‘tiktok as algorithmically mediated biographical illumination: autism, self-discovery and platformed diagnosis on #autisktok’, ‘adolescent friendship, cross-sexuality ties and attitudes toward sexual minorities: a social network approach to intergroup contact’, ‘school transitions, peer processes and delinquency: a social network approach to turning points in adolescence’, special issue of ethnic and racial studies on ‘cultural taxation’ receives introduction co-authored by northeastern professor.

War By Affirmative Action?

Victor Davis Hanson American Greatness

Why does Biden play Iranian poker with American and Israeli lives?

Answer? He envisions war sort of like affirmative action, in which the less accomplished belligerent is allowed all sorts of concessions for the sake of equity.

Israeli and American military capability, and particularly their missile defenses, are seen as unfair, almost like high achievers’ top SAT scores that are seen as unearned and used to privilege some over others and therefore must be countered or dropped.

Given Iran’s and its surrogates’ incompetence, the administration, then, must extend the theocracy some allowances “to level the playing field.” Biden believes in an equality of opportunity in war, when an aggressor does its best to attack or indeed destroy a defender, who in turn does its own best to retaliate and achieve victory.

Instead, the Biden administration sees war leading to equality of result as something to be waged “proportionally,” especially when the power attacked is stronger and Western while the attacking aggressor is weaker and non-Western. The method, then, is to restrain the western power and give repeated chances for the non-western aggressors to catch up.

As a result, the Biden administration’s strategic attitude toward Iran ignores Iranian intent and agendas. So it does not respond fully to its acts of aggression and thereby almost rewards the incompetence of Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis without consideration of their murderous aims.

Americans are thus baffled that Biden has not responded to some 170 or more attacks on U.S. installations in the Middle East by Iranian-backed terrorists in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon. But in his calculus, Americans “can take the hit” due to their superior defenses—appeasement that only assures more hits.

Thus, other than a few apparently acceptable wounded or dead, there is no need for disproportionate responses to reestablish deterrence and end such opportunistic attacks. Such calculus in the Biden team’s mind would be “over the top,” perhaps “unfair,” or even “medieval.” And yet, it certainly would stop all such aggression quickly and warn aggressors not to touch a single American.

After the successful but mostly demonstrative Israel April 19 retaliatory strike against the Iranian anti-aircraft missile batteries at Isfahan, Biden cautioned Israel “to take the win” and apparently not to rub in the fact of Iranian incompetence, much less stage a follow-up and much greater response.

But what if instead, Biden had warned the Iranians that Israel was not through. Rather, he would tell the Iranians that the restrained Israeli response was a one-off warning and demonstration to Iran that 1) Israel had the ability to strike and destroy the very protective shield of the nuclear installations at nearby Natanz, and thus Natanz itself and plants like it; 2) that unlike the 320 missile/drone Iranian attack on Israel, even Israel’s tiny response was entirely successful; 3) and that in any future Iranian-envisioned nuclear attack on Israel, Iran’s rockets would likely either fail at launch or in the air (half did so on April, 13), with the remnant having a 99 percent surety of being shot down, while earning a 100 percent surety of a devastating Israel counter-attack with the same sort of weapons that Iran claims it will shortly use.

Would such a warning have been more likely to end the current tit-for-tat, “de-escalatory escalation” than the Biden administration’s advice to Israel to “take the win”–in an endless cycle of supposedly managed violence as Iran and its terrorists seek to get it right and respond commensurately?

Similarly, recently, third-party communications with Iran were disclosed about its earlier April 13 attack on Israel. Apparently, the Turkish third-party emissaries claimed that “Iran informed us in advance of what would happen. Possible developments also came up during the meeting with (Secretary of State Antony) Blinken, and they (the U.S.) conveyed to Iran through us that this reaction must be within certain limits.”

Translated, that meant that apparently launching over 320 cruise, ballistic missiles and drones were acceptable Iranian responses as long as they did not kill too many Jews?

So what did Joe Biden, Antony Blinken, and Jake Sullivan actually define as damage “within certain limits?” Something like the relatively small number of dead and wounded Americans who have fallen victim to Iranian-backed terrorist attacks from the Red Sea to Iraq and Jordan?

“Within certain limits” for Iran certainly could not mean the huge number of lethal projectiles Iran sent into Israel that were intended by Iran to kill thousands, but apparently only how many Israelis were killed by them?

So again, what would have been beyond “certain limits” for team Biden? One dead Israeli for each launched rocket, missile, or drone? 320 Jews or so in total? Did Biden and Blinken assume that some 300 or so projectiles would be mostly shot down or blown up, and thus they played poker with Israeli lives and assumed that the attack would probably fail?

But what might have happened had instead Biden transmitted to Iran the following warning:

“Given your record of unleashing terror and death throughout the Middle East, I warn you not to send a single rocket into Israel. If you do, we will ensure that none get through, but we will not ensure that there will be any limits on what will likely be a devastating Israel response to your homeland.”

Would Iran have then sent the 320 missiles?

When Israel went into Gaza to end the medieval violence perpetrated by the Hamas cowardly terrorists, it had already been the target of some 7,000 Hamas rockets aimed at its civilian centers and bases. Did Biden see that failed Hamas effort to kill thousands of additional Jews as a legitimate cause for Israel to go into Gaza and destroy the rocket-launching Hamas?

Or instead, did Biden consider Israel’s unique ability to conduct war—again, sort of like having high SAT scores and a straight A average as proof of unwarranted privilege in admissions—as a disproportionate (and likely “unfair”) advantage over Hamas that thus should be ignored or discounted rather than admired? But had Hamas killed 1,000 Jews with its 7,000 rockets, would Biden have given Israel the green light to respond fully? Or would it have taken only 500 deaths? Or was the magic number 250 killed?

What would have happened had Biden not specified certain restraints on the IDF but instead, on October 21, transmitted the following message to Hamas: “You began this war with inhuman slaughter on October 7 and massive rocket attacks on Israeli cities, and Israel will now end the war with your destruction.”

Six months later, would the Middle East now be safer without Hamas?

In mid-October 2023, a failed Islamic jihad rocket hit Gaza’s al-Ahli hospital, prompting the blood libel that it was Israelis who supposedly were responsible and had killed hospital patients. An upset Joe Biden was asked about the identification of the perpetrator.

He answered with a joke, but a jest nevertheless quite revealing: “And I’m not suggesting that Hamas deliberately did it either. It’s that old thing; gotta learn how to shoot straight.” Aside from the embarrassing fact that Biden seemed more wary about wrongly blaming the murderous Hamas for the Islamic Jihad rocket than his ally Israel, did he really mean that the global condemnation of Israel for the act of Islamic jihad—and the predicament it put Biden in—would have simply vanished had only Islamic Jihad shot “straight”?

And further translated, did Biden logically mean—if only the Islamic Jihad rocket had not fallen short on Gazans but instead had reached its intended target of civilians inside Israel, then there would have been no controversies, no melodramas, given the stronger power Israel could more easily have “taken the hit?”

Note that Biden did not really express much anger that Islamic Jihad was shooting rockets to kill Jewish civilians. He was only lamenting that its incompetence had led to a blood libel, which required embarrassing explanations from Biden himself.

Biden, note, said something somewhat similar about a possible Putin invasion of Ukraine. He had predicted the U.S. response on whether it was a “minor” offensive or not. In other words, the American response was not predicated on the violation of national borders by an aggressor against an independent nation, but how effectively the aggressor attacked.

In the American Left’s vision of contemporary war, the West brings too many advantages in science, technology, and wealth, especially when fighting in the skies and not in the messy suburbs of Mosul, Fallujah, or Gaza City.

The result is disproportionate. Accordingly, it does not matter that Hamas only stopped butchering, raping, and mutilating Israelis at about 1,200 deaths because of an impending IDF arrival or killed few despite 7,000 rocket launches into Israel, when their rocketeers had sought to kill tens of thousands of Israelis.

Instead, by their very failures at the art of war, Iran and its surrogates are constructed as victims, not aggressors, at the moment when either their targets do not suffer too many causalities or their own losses vastly exceed those whom they sought to slaughter.

Third-party managed proportionality, accompanied by the banality of “both sides are at fault,” is not morality but pretentious amorality—as well as a sure prescription for endless war.

Or, in other words, what is unfolding now in the Middle East.

29 thoughts on “War By Affirmative Action?”

President Biden worries about equity. I am reminded of something I heard during a lecture from a Special Forces commander. “If at any point in the mission you find yourself in a fair fight, you did not accomplish your pre-mission planning correctly.”

Minor incursions are allowed by the obidens.

In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king. You sir, are a rarity with both eyes with perfect vision. Your wisdom , I suspect , comes from my perception that you also are an old soul, which probably had something to do with your early fascination with ancient studies. Blessings upon you. Alan C. Leventen ( Sgt. First Class ret. ) IDF

I wish the esteemed VDH stuck to domestic issues. He is too neocon for me on international issues.

Mike Burns – please clarify with specifics what “too neocon” means and what it has to do with the article.

To underscore your point, the vital importances of deterents, we should remember the circumstances in which the U.S. embassy hostages were released by Iran.

It occurred while newly elected President Ronald Reagan was taking his oath of office. Before he was done with his oath, it was announced on the news that the hostages were now freed, and in the air, flying home.

There for all to see, was the difference between the unpredictable Ronald Reagan and the Feckless Jimmy Carter. The Iranians were simply not willing to take the chance of being bombed into oblivion by Reagan.

An interesting interpretation of the actions of Biden and the administration, which otherwise defy definition. Since clearly not everyone in the admin has cognitive decline, (although their getting Biden elected by hook and by crook makes one wonder), some other explanation has to exist. It may come down to either this, or utter systemic incompetence. I’m not sure which worries me more.

The israelie airforce has been unimpeded throughout this conflict. Reaching 400 sorties every single day and or night, no aircraft losses anywhere within the region. That has now been demonstrated inside Iran as well. Isreal can destroy any and all enemy force until it’s air superiority is neutralized, there is nothing more to say.

Great again VDH. No one else puts together the facts and through critical thinking posits a thesis that is brilliant AND unique AND so true. Keep up the good work.

The main question here is ——Does Biden even think at all?????? When he reads off a script and jumps off the tracks he spouts foolishness and lies which require zero thinking just open mouth and let it spout out!!!!!!

I don’t believe it’s possible that Biden is running things, his brain is too addled at this point. His history of ineptitude is well known, and it’s fairly obvious that others behind the scenes are planning and making all the stupid decisions we are witnessing. It’s likely the same group that was in the Obama administration because we see a great many of the same players behind Biden now. The only question is “who” or more likely “which group of people” are in charge. Biden isn’t capable of planning anything, not now and not in the past when he had more of his ignorant marbles firing on all cylinders.

Wow, how many of the 1200 deaths were due to Hamas and how many were due to actions of the IDF?

Victor Davis Hanson has become the clearest, most informed and most logically thoughtful observer of contemporary events. He is a cultural treasure.

My son Is graduating this year valedictorian of one of the very best College prep high schools in California and indeed the country. His GPA is off the charts as is his SAT score. His extracurricular activities as well as his volunteer hours are equally impressive. His IQ is in the genius category. He started his own “Finance & Investing” club as a true freshman bringing in speakers and growing it to a full fledged, mature entity and is now handing the reins over for the next guy to run it. His social skills are amazing and he can converse and mingle with anyone. He wants to go into business and applied to all the top schools in the country. His backup university was UCLA. He has been wait listed at Georgetown, Penn, NYU, Boston College, Harvard, Columbia, USC, and many others. Believing that he won’t make it off the wait list of any of these schools he has accepted at UCLA. Although we are Catholic, our family last name is very similar to a historically Jewish last name. DEI along with antisemitism and affirmative action(gone underground since the Supreme court ruling but alive and well) has stolen his future. He is a white male. Hispanic Kids & kids of “color” from his school with barely above average GPS’s and without SAT scores have gotten into schools he could not. Meritocracy is dead. The best & the brightest are being actively excluded and America will pay the price some day as we are out competed. If I sound bitter is because your damned right I am. You should be too.

Indeed, many of us are bitter.

But not much escapes Mother Nature regardless of whether a part of the wilderness or a folly of mankind. The day when nations that reward and emphasize meritocracy over one that merely wants to “level the playing field” is that bright locomotive light speeding toward us in our tunnel. They already toy with us.

Hopefully, enough wake up before it is too late but should Biden take the prize in November, the chances of a recovery of the ‘shining house on the hill’ will be slim to none.

Tell him to join the Marines.

Hillsdale, Liberty or some other school that ignores the DEI BS. Their out there and would love to have a student of your son’s caliber. PLUS, he will get a better education than these schools that have gone WOKE

He was granted a blessing not to go to those indoctrination camps. I worry that UCLA is also a poison pill. Let him take a year off and reapply to Hillsdale or a similar school with a classical education. In the meantime he should found his own company and get ahead on his goals.

Unctuous, fatuous, and very dangerous (beyond destruction of the Ivy League).

VDH frames current events with logic, wisdom, and facts. His analysis is the bucket of water Dorthy poured on the Wicked Witch, also known as Biden’s foreign policy.

At first glance this explanation seems too sick, too absurd even for Joe Biden, and it would never have occurred to me, but I think you’re probably right as usual. It’s hard to comprehend the level of sheer stupidity that is behind almost everything our government has done over the past three years (or, I guess, Biden over the past 50 years). It just seems impossible that they can actually think their actions are helping make anyone’s life better, which begs the question, what in God’s name do they think they’re doing?

Sam Faddis: “Consider Maher Bitar. Maher is the Senior Director for Intelligence at the National Security Council.”

https://open.substack.com/pub/andmagazine/p/want-to-know-why-our-policy-now-favors?r=p0lxs&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

It would have been cool to see if the IDF got their orders ”misconstrued,” and they bombed to hell all of Iran’s weaponry and nuke facilities. Then Bibi could have ”apologized” to Biden, offered to buy him an ice cream cone, and promised not to do it again.

Only nine months to go until the garbage trio of Biden, Blinken and Sullivan are outta there. And if the donks win, then the US deserves everything that comes to it in the next four years.

I appreciate your analysis, as always. I would add, however, that “Biden’s” (which is to say, the third Obama administration and its radical anti-American adherents) response was predicated on a demographic as well as philosophic foundation. The demographics are simple: a concentration of adherents of islam in certain urban locales which “Biden” believes are needed to win reelection and which have been specifically imported for that purpose. The philosophical basis springs from that.

Well said VDH.

It is tragic that this view strikes a clear picture of the woke (and weak) leadership in Washington.

Excellent analogy packed with loads of truth. Joe Biden, in my opinion, represents a danger not only to international peace but to domestic issues as well at home. Biden performance for the past three years has been awful! He seems to have no understanding of the balance of world power in terms of keeping peace. Have Democrats ever understood the use of military force?

Did Biden’s regime orchestrate this whole ‘war’? It occurred just days after he coincidentally said it might. Hmmmmm.

The Biden* Admin is simply atempting to square a difficult circle. The sympathies of Biden’s* handlers and advisors are clearly with Hamas, yet Biden* cannot plainly express those sympaghies, especially in an election year and alienate voters and (especially jewish) donors who symathize with Israel.

In the past, Democrat US presidents were able to call for “proprtionality” and use US influence to limit the damage Israel inflicted in response to a given provocation. This dance dominated Israel-palestinian relations for decades, and may have come to an end.

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Striking findings from 2023

Pew Research Center has gathered data around some of this year’s defining news stories, from the rise of artificial intelligence to the debate over affirmative action in college admissions . Here’s a look back at 2023 through some of our most striking research findings.

These findings only scratch the surface of the Center’s research from this past year .

A record-high share of 40-year-olds in the U.S. have never been married, according to a Center analysis of the most recent U.S. Census Bureau data . As of 2021, a quarter of 40-year-olds had never been married – up from 6% in 1980.

In 2021, the demographic groups most likely not to have ever been married by age 40 include men, Black Americans and those without a four-year college degree.

A Center survey conducted in April found that relatively few Americans see marriage as essential for people to live a fulfilling life compared with factors like job satisfaction and friendship. While majorities say that having a job or career they enjoy (71%) and having close friends (61%) are extremely or very important for living a fulfilling life, far fewer say this about having children (26%) or being married (23%). Larger shares, in fact, say having children (42%) or being married (44%) are not too or not at all important.

About half of Americans say the increased use of artificial intelligence in daily life makes them feel more concerned than excited – up 14 percentage points from last year, according to an August survey . Overall, 52% of Americans say they feel this way, an increase from 38% in December 2022.

Just 10% of adults say they are more excited than concerned about the increased use of AI, while 36% say they feel an equal mix of these emotions.

The rise in concern about AI has taken place alongside growing public awareness of the technology. Nine-in-ten adults say they have heard either a lot (33%) or a little (56%) about artificial intelligence. The share of those who have heard  a lot  is up 7 points since December 2022.

For the first time in over 30 years of public opinion polling, Americans’ views of the U.S. Supreme Court are more negative than positive, a July survey found . A narrow majority (54%) have an unfavorable view of the high court, while fewer than half (44%) express a favorable one.

The court’s favorable rating has declined 26 percentage points since 2020, following a series of high-profile rulings on issues including affirmative action in college admissions, LGBTQ+ rights and student loans. The drop in favorability is primarily due to a decline among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, just 24% of whom express a favorable opinion of the court.

A growing share of U.S. adults say the federal government should take steps to restrict false information online, even if it limits freedom of information, a June survey found . The share of U.S. adults with this view has risen from 39% in 2018 to 55% in 2023.

In the most recent survey, 42% of adults took the opposite view, saying the government should protect freedom of information, even if it means false information can be published.

Still, Americans remain more likely to say that tech companies – rather than the U.S. government – should be responsible for restricting false information online. About two-thirds (65%) said this in June.

The number of U.S. children and teens killed by gunfire rose 50% in just two years, according to a 2023 analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). In 2019, there were 1,732 gun deaths among U.S. children and teens under 18. By 2021, that figure had increased to 2,590.

The gun death  rate  among children and teens – a measure that adjusts for changes in the nation’s population – rose 46% during that span.

Both the number and rate of children and teens killed by gunfire in 2021 were the highest since at least 1999, the earliest year for which this information is available in the CDC’s mortality database.

Most Asian Americans view their ancestral homelands favorably – but not Chinese Americans, according to a multilingual, nationally representative survey of Asian American adults .

Only about four-in-ten Chinese Americans (41%) have a favorable opinion of China, while 35% have an unfavorable one. Another 22% say they have a neither favorable nor unfavorable view. This stands in contrast to how other Asian Americans view their ancestral homelands. For instance, about nine-in-ten Taiwanese and Japanese Americans have a very or somewhat favorable opinion of their place of origin, as do large majorities of Korean, Indian and Filipino Americans.

While Chinese Americans’ views of China are more mixed, they still have a more favorable opinion of the country than other Asian adults do. Just 14% of other Asian Americans view China favorably.

Even before the Israel-Hamas war, Israelis had grown more skeptical of a two-state solution. In a survey conducted in March and April , prior to the war, just 35% of Israelis thought “a way can be found for Israel and an independent Palestinian state to coexist peacefully.” This share had declined by 9 percentage points since 2017 and 15 points since 2013.

Among both Arabs and Jews living in Israel, there have been declines over the past decade in the share of people who believe that a peaceful coexistence between Israel and an independent Palestinian state is possible.

A majority of Americans say they would tip 15% or less for an average restaurant dining experience, including 2% who wouldn’t leave a tip at all, an August survey shows . The survey presented respondents with a hypothetical scenario in which they went to a sit-down restaurant and had average – but not exceptional – food and service. About six-in-ten (57%) say they would leave a tip of 15% or less in this situation. Another 12% say they would leave a tip of 18%, and a quarter of people say they’d tip 20% or more.

Adults in lower-income households and those ages 65 and older are more likely than their counterparts to say they would tip 15% or less in a situation like this.

Partisan views of Twitter – the social media platform now called X – have shifted over the last two years, with Republican users’ views of the site growing more positive and those of Democratic users becoming more negative, according to a March survey . The share of Republican and GOP-leaning users who said the site is mostly bad for American democracy fell from 60% in 2021 to 21% earlier this year. At the same time, the share of Republican users who said the site is mostly good for democracy rose from 17% to 43% during the same span.

Democrats’ views moved in the opposite direction during that time frame. The percentage of Democratic and Democratic-leaning Twitter users who said the platform is good for American democracy decreased from 47% to 24%, while the share who said it is bad for democracy increased – though more modestly – from 28% to 35%.

These changes in views follow Elon Musk’s takeover of the platform in fall 2022.

Nearly half of U.S. workers who get paid time off don’t take all the time off their employer offers, according to a February survey of employed Americans . Among those who say their employer offers paid time off for vacation, doctors’ appointments or to deal with minor illnesses, 46% say they take less time off than they are allowed. A similar share (48%) say they typically take all the time off they are offered.

Among those who don’t take all their paid time off, the most common reasons cited are not feeling the need to take more time off (52% say this), worrying they might fall behind at work (49%), and feeling badly about their co-workers taking on additional work (43%).

Smaller shares cite other concerns, including the feeling that taking more time off might hurt their chances for job advancement (19%) or that they might risk losing their job (16%). Some 12% say their manager or supervisor discourages them from taking time off.

An overwhelming majority of Americans (79%) express a negative sentiment when asked to describe politics in the United States these days, a July survey found . Just 2% offer a positive word or phrase, while 10% say something neutral.

Among those who volunteered an answer, 8% use the word “ divisive” or variations of it, while 2% cite the related term “polarized.” “Corrupt” is the second-most frequent answer, given by 6% of respondents.

The top 15 most cited words also include “messy,” “chaos,” “broken” and “dysfunctional.” Many respondents are even more negative in their views: “terrible,” “disgusting,” “disgrace” and the phrase “dumpster fire” are each offered by at least 1% of respondents.

Around half of Americans (53%) say they have ever been visited by a dead family member in a dream or in another form, according to a spring survey . Overall, 46% of Americans report that they’ve been visited by a dead family member in a dream, while 31% report having been visited by dead relatives in some other form.

Women are more likely than men to report these experiences.

While the survey asked whether people have had interactions with dead relatives, it did not ask for explanations. So, we don’t know whether people view these experiences as mysterious or supernatural, whether they see them as having natural or scientific causes, or some of both.

For example, the survey did not ask what respondents meant when they said they had been visited in a dream by a dead relative. Some might have meant that relatives were trying to send them messages or information from beyond the grave. Others might have had something more commonplace in mind, such as dreaming about a favorite memory of a family member.

More Americans disapprove than approve of selective colleges and universities taking race and ethnicity into account when making admissions decisions, according to another spring survey , fielded before the Supreme Court ruled on the practice in June. Half of U.S. adults disapprove of colleges considering race and ethnicity to increase diversity at the schools, while a third approve and 16% are not sure.

Views differ widely by party, as well as by race and ethnicity. Around three-quarters of Republicans and Republican leaners (74%) disapprove of the practice, while 54% of Democrats and Democratic leaners approve of it.

Nearly half of Black Americans (47%) say they approve of colleges and universities considering race and ethnicity in admissions, while smaller shares of Hispanic (39%), Asian (37%) and White (29%) Americans say the same.

The share of Americans who say science has had a mostly positive effect on society has declined since 2019, before the coronavirus outbreak, a fall survey shows : 57% say science has had a mostly positive effect on society, down from 73% in 2019.

About a third of adults (34%) now say the impact of science on society has been equally positive and negative. And 8% say science has had a mostly negative impact on society.

Democrats have become much more likely than Republicans to say science has had a mostly positive impact on society (69% vs. 47%). This gap is the result of steeper declines in positive ratings among Republicans than among Democrats since 2019 (down 23 points and 8 points, respectively).

Nearly three-in-ten Americans express an unfavorable opinion of both major political parties – the highest share in at least three decades, according to a July survey . Overall, 28% of Americans have an unfavorable opinion of both the Republican and Democratic parties. This is more than quadruple the share in 1994, when just 6% of Americans viewed both parties negatively.

A majority of Americans say TikTok is a threat to national security, according to a survey conducted in May . About six-in-ten adults (59%) see the social media platform as a major or minor threat to national security in the United States. Just 17% say it is  not  a threat to national security and another 23% aren’t sure.

Views vary by partisanship and age. Seven-in-ten Republicans and GOP leaners say TikTok is at least a minor threat to national security, compared with 53% of Democrats and Democratic leaners. Conservative Republicans are more likely than moderate or liberal Republicans – or Democrats of any ideology – to say the view the app as a major threat.

Nearly half of those ages 65 and older (46%) see TikTok as a major threat to national security, compared with a much smaller share (13%) of adults ages 18 to 29.

Read the other posts in our striking findings series:

• Striking findings from 2022
• Striking findings from 2021
• 20 striking findings from 2020
• 19 striking findings from 2019
• 18 striking findings from 2018
• 17 striking findings from 2017
• 16 striking findings from 2016
• 15 striking findings from 2015
• 14 striking findings from 2014
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Katherine Schaeffer is a research analyst at Pew Research Center

Private, selective colleges are most likely to use race, ethnicity as a factor in admissions decisions

Americans and affirmative action: how the public sees the consideration of race in college admissions, hiring, asian americans hold mixed views around affirmative action, more americans disapprove than approve of colleges considering race, ethnicity in admissions decisions, hispanic enrollment reaches new high at four-year colleges in the u.s., but affordability remains an obstacle, most popular.

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