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My professional perspective is working in a student services leadership role. I will be receiving my M. Ed in Student Development and Leadership in Higher Education and currently hold a B. A in Spanish. I am now a Senior Academic Advisor at Richland Collegiate High School. This Legal Guide Padlet is a resources guide for student services professionals to assist them in understanding the current legal requirements related if race should be part of the College Admission Process. I choose this topic because it has been a topic trending in recent years. Cases have gone to the US Supreme Court, and the ruling has not been evident across the country due to the Affirmative Action in college admissions.

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Universities and even education, in general, were only given to Caucasians, consequently providing a rise to historically black colleges after the Civil War in the 19th century (US Department of Education, 2020). The admissions process has now flipped as colleges are currently looking for students of color to make up a robust and diverse campus. In addition, many people are looking for a career to support themselves and their families financially in today's world. The best way through this is through education in colleges and universities. The college you go to will most likely determine your career and future job. Therefore, college admissions are crucial for each student to have an equal opportunity in the workforce.

Reference:
US Department of Education. (2020). Historically Black Colleges and universities and higher education desegregation. Home. Retrieved October 1, 2021, from https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/hq9511.html.

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"Affirmative Action: A Moment of Clarity Amongst the Confusion" by C. Rob Shorette II and Edward J. Smith is about Affirmative Action. The most relevant policy or program designed to counter discrimination against minority groups and women in employment and education. In higher education institutions, affirmative action refers to admission policies that provide equal access to education for those groups that have been historically excluded or underrepresented, such as women and minorities.

URL:
https://www.naspa.org/blog/affirmative-action-a-moment-of-clarity-amongst-the-confusion

Reference:
Shorette II, C. R., & Smith, E. J. (2014). Affirmative action: A moment of clarity amongst the confusion. Home. Retrieved September 30, 2021, from https://www.naspa.org/blog/affirmative-action-a-moment-of-clarity-amongst-the-confusion.

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Last week marked the 50 th anniversary of the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Two months ago, the U.S. reflected on the 60 years since the Supreme Court ruling that desegregated our public schools.

Yet, Black and Latino students are less likely to attend racially diverse schools today than at any time in the last four decades. Moreover, the racial and socioeconomic diversity at many of America's elite colleges and universities remains stagnant or has regressed during the same time period.

These trends highlight major setbacks in educational equity and racial equality, yet, America continues its fiercely contentious debate over the validity and necessity of measures to promote racial diversity in our educational institutions. What's more, the debate remains anchored in personal testimonies that bewilder the general public and hamper our collective ability to make sensible decisions about our systems of education.

Thus, we thought it would be useful to provide a brief overview of the history and evolution of one such measure: affirmative action. In doing so, we attempt to clarify some of the common misconceptions we have encountered in our respective academic and professional journeys.

How Did Affirmative Action Come To Be?

As written by President John F. Kennedy in Executive Order 10925 and codified in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, affirmative action "refers to both mandatory and voluntary programs intended to affirm the civil rights of designated classes of individuals by taking positive action to protect them from discrimination."

The program directed organizations that received federal funding to employ measures to end discrimination on the basis race, creed, color, or national origin. In other words, "affirmative action" did not mandate the adoption of specific federally regulated programs. Rather, organizations had to demonstrate that they were complying with the non-discrimination requirements set forth by the government.

Researchers have uniformly concluded that immediate and long-term increases in workplace diversity were attributable to the Executive Order, serving the reparative function of its initial statement.

How Has Affirmative Action in Higher Education Evolved?

Shortly after President Lyndon B. Johnson directed government contractors to use affirmative action policies in their recruitment practices in 1965, higher education institutions began to implement them as well. Over time, courts have ruled on various aspects of affirmative action practices in higher education and have ultimately refined the ways in which institutions can address racial inequality in college admissions.

In 1978, the U.S. Supreme Court in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke ruled that considering race in college admissions was permissible as a compelling public interest.

25 years later, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on two affirmative action cases involving the University of Michigan. First, it decided that the University of Michigan Law School's race-conscious admissions policies were acceptable since they considered many other factors along with race in a holistic process. Contrarily, it ruled that the undergraduate admissions point system was unconstitutional since it awarded points arbitrarily based on race.

Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court passed the case of Fisher v. University of Texas, Austin back down to the lower courts, but not before suggesting that affirmative action policies must be narrowly tailored to achieve educational diversity and would need to meet the standards of strict scrutiny in the future.

Most recently, Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action case in 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a voter-approved amendment to the state constitution banning the use of affirmative action, stating that voters enacted a law using their rights as citizens to engage in the political process.

Unfortunately, after nearly 40 years of debate and analysis since the first Supreme Court ruling, broad misconceptions about affirmative action in higher education persist. Fantasies about formalized quota systems that give candidates of color admissions slots, while simultaneously taking away slots that white students earn remain pervasive.

Opponents often describe hypothetical scenarios that illustrate the dramatics of a "final shot" where two equally qualified applicants square-off against each other for admissions at an elite institution. Grossly oversimplifying the intricacies of the admissions process, these opponents postulate that affirmative action uses racial minority status as a "tie-breaker" awarding the win to students of color based on their race alone.

As pervasive as these claims are, they aren't buttressed by 40 years of legal precedent, constitutional law, and education research.

Quota Systems

Although it seems needless to say, it's important to state that quota systems have been deemed unconstitutional since the 1978 Regents University of California v. Bakke decision. Further, there is nothing in the Civil Rights Act, Executive Order 10925, or any of the aforementioned legal cases that mandate the use of an affirmative action approach to workplace diversity or college admissions. Rather, affirmative action allows organizations to employ a set of actions to create the composition of student profiles that they deem desirable given its mission, vision, and goals.

The Supreme Court has affirmed institutional diversity as a governmental and public interest. The Fisher decision reinforced the notion that affirmative action policies must be narrowly tailored to achieve educational diversity and evaluated under standards of strict scrutiny.

The Final Shot

For colleges and universities, the college admissions process typically includes the careful review of a candidate's application portfolio. Factors including prior academic performance (e.g., high school GPA, rigor of course-taking), quality of personal statement, community-based leadership and volunteer service, legacy status, residency in an underrepresented region of the country, and professional and career aspirations are all reflective of elements often included in the criteria.

The color of one's skin has never been the sole deciding factor and most colleges and universities will never find themselves in a toss-up over the last spot. The admissions process at many elite institutions is carefully constructed, lasting the better part of an academic year, with several waves and iterations, reviews, and evaluations. It's time we give admissions personnel more credit for the hard work they do.

Being White is a Disadvantage in College Admissions

The idea of using "objective" criteria to determine admissibility through "merit" has been a central component of the debate around affirmative action. A popular belief is that higher standardized test scores and higher GPAs are the best indicators of a strong candidate. The idea of "meritocracy" assumes that individuals simply commit to working hard and eventually achieve success. This notion ignores the reality that high standardized test scores are not necessarily illustrative of hard work, determination, or motivation.

Educational researchers have proven the bias in the process by which students are prepared for and take standardized tests, processes that primarily advantage affluent students that usually have high levels of financial, social, and cultural capital. Moreover, standardized tests have been the topic of scientific studies that have disproven the predictive power of these tests on future academic achievement in college.

To expand the conversation of racial advantages, one such example is the advantage afforded to a legacy applicant (a.k.a. the child of an alum), which at highly selective colleges are still primarily white and which one researcher found makes a legacy applicant on average three times more likely to be admitted than non-legacy students.

Not to mention, White students are more likely to be reared in households where one or both parents are college educated, a background strongly correlated with enrollment in a four-year postsecondary institution. These are unearned structural benefits that primarily advantage one type of student, as opposed to programmatic advantages set up consciously to promote the social mobility of all students.

What About Class-Based Affirmative Action?

An interesting proposal, indeed. For example, a wide body of education policy research posits that using class-based affirmative action would be a sufficient substitute for race-based approaches. In addition, many still believe that society has changed in substantive ways, so that if affirmative action were not present, the racial makeup of higher education institutions would remain unchanged. The evidence, however, suggests that the bans on race-based affirmative action has hindered progress toward achieving racial equity.

Perhaps increases in underrepresented minorities at an institution like the University of Texas, Austin show promise. However, even the University of Texas, Austin, which should theoretically benefit from a top 10 percent program that draws students from majority Latino public schools, still found it necessary to consider race to achieve institutional diversity goals since researchers have found that the program still disproportionately benefits white students in the most-advantaged schools. Furthermore, the results after the decisions in California, Michigan, and Washington show that Latino, Native American, and Black undergraduate enrollments in selective or elite public institutions has decreased or has not kept up with state demographics since these race-affirmative action bans.

California in particular experienced sharp decreases in underrepresented minorities at some of its premier institutions after the Board of Regents voted to remove race, religion, sex, color, ethnicity and national origin as consideration factors for college admissions. In 1996, Proposition 209 took it one step further by ruling out race-conscious outreach of financial aid. As a result, minority admissions dropped dramatically in subsequent years, leading to environments seen at the University of California, Los Angeles, where first-time Black male enrollees (48) where outnumbered by the number of NCAA championships the school attained in its history (109).

Our nation's challenge to embrace and employ tools to promote diversity has left us with the unfortunate trends outlined in the introduction of this piece. For all the gains this country has made in attaining workplace diversity, we've taken two steps back by creating an educational system that steers certain students into prestigious universities and other kids into other schools.

What's more, we take these trends as an absolute, overlooking or altogether ignoring the fact that disadvantages and advantages of past generations carry on to successive generations. It is our hope that clearing up the misconceptions discussed in this article will produce a better understanding of race-based issues and contribute to more unified equity efforts in higher education.

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Affirmative Action: A Moment of Clarity Amongst the Confusion

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C. Rob Shorette, NASPA RPI Fellow, and Edward J. Smith, NASPA RPI Senior Policy Analyst, provide a brief overview of the history and evolution of affirmative action. In doing so, they clarify some of the common misconceptions they have encountered in their respective academic and professional journeys.

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"Confronting Racism in Admissions" by Elizabeth Redden overview issues on race and college admissions.

- Research shows college admission officers focus recruiting efforts on wealthy, predominantly white high schools.
- In some states, prohibitions on affirmative action preclude any consideration of race in the admissions process.
- One area in admissions where there has been a rapid change since the start of the pandemic is the movement to make standardized tests optional.
-Fewer than 7 percent of colleges say race or ethnicity has “considerable influence” on admission decisions, while 17.8 percent say it has “moderate influence” and 16.9 percent “limited influence,” according to NACAC’s 2019 “State of College Admission” report.
-The journal Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis found “the elimination of affirmative action has led to persistent declines in the share of underrepresented minorities among students admitted to and enrolling in public flagship universities in these states.”

URL: https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2020/10/26/will-conversation-turn-action-when-it-comes-issues-racial-equity

Reference:
Redden, E. (2020). Inside higher ed. Will conversation turn to action when it comes to issues of racial equity in college admission? Retrieved September 30, 2021, from https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2020/10/26/will-conversation-turn-action-when-it-comes-issues-racial-equity.

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Inside Higher Ed | Higher Education News, Events and Jobs

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Will conversation turn to action when it comes to issues of racial equity in college admission?

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Is now the moment when college admission professionals will start breaking down known barriers to admission for Black students?

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"California is closer to restoring affirmative action in college admissions" by Jeremy Bauer-Wolf overview the issues occurring by affirmative action in college admissions.

-Only California (1996), Texas (1996), Washington (1998), Florida (1999), Michigan (2006), Nebraska (2008), Arizona (2010), New Hampshire (2012), and Oklahoma (2012) where race-conscious admissions policies are illegal.
-Asian-American groups halted lawmakers' attempt to undo the affirmative action ban six years ago.
- Decades of court precedent have backed race-conscious admissions policies.
-California's colleges could have created more programs to help ease the academic transition for disadvantaged students

URL: https://www.highereddive.com/news/california-is-closer-to-restoring-affirmative-action-in-college-admissions/580584/

Reference:
Bauer-Wolf, J. (2020, June 25). California is closer to restoring affirmative action in college admissions. Higher Ed Dive. Retrieved September 30, 2021, from https://www.highereddive.com/news/california-is-closer-to-restoring-affirmative-action-in-college-admissions/580584/.

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Constitutional Law: The 14th Amendment creates the foundation for educational equity. "No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws" (U.S. Const. Amend. XIV).

URL: https://www.senate.gov/civics/constitution_item/constitution.htm#amendments

Reference:
U.S. Const. Amend. XIV

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Judicial Law: Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action. means a policy or program designed to counter discrimination against minority groups and women in areas

such as employment and education. In institutions of higher education, affirmative action refers to admission policies that provide equal access to education for those groups that have been historically excluded or underrepresented, such as women and minorities. Admissions, Financial Assistance, Faculty Hiring, etc. (Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, 2014)

URL: https://supreme.justia.com/

Reference:
Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, 2014

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Statutory Law: Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964- Congress passed Public Law 82-352 which forbade discrimination based on sex as well as race in hiring, promoting, and firing under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance (Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, 1964).

URL: http://uscode.house.gov/statviewer.htm?volume=104&page=327

Reference:
Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, 1964

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Judicial Law: Fisher v. UT Austin was about Abigail Fisher, a high school senior who was not admitted at UT Austin. Abigail filed a lawsuit against UT Austin in federal district court, claiming that the school's admissions consideration of race in the admissions process violated the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. Case returns in the Supreme Court, which ruled in a 4-3 decision that the use of race as criteria of admission by UT Austing was constitutional and respected the strict scrutiny and did not violate any constitutional law. (Fisher v. UT Austin, 2016)

URL: https://supreme.justia.com/

Reference:
Fisher v. UT Austin, 2016

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UT Austin Admission

The UT Austin admissions decisions it is based on a holistic review. Texas law offers eligible applicants automatic admission for those that are top 6% freshman applicants to public colleges and universities. Students have the right to submit an appeal if the admission decision is not what the student expected (Ut Austin, 2021).

According to UT Austin Holistic Application Review (2021), the following items are considered during the holistic review:

Class rank

Strength of academic background

Test scores*

Record of achievements, honors, and awards

Special accomplishments, work, and service both in and out of school

Essays

Special circumstances that put the applicant’s academic achievements into context, including his or her socioeconomic status, experience in a single parent home, family responsibilities, experience overcoming adversity, cultural background, race and ethnicity, the language spoken in the applicant’s home, and other information in the applicant’s file

Recommendations (although not required)

Competitiveness of the major to which the student applies

URL: https://admissions.utexas.edu/apply/decisions

Reference:
UT Austin. (2021). Admission decisions. Admission Decisions | Undergraduate Admissions | The University of Texas at Austin. (2021). Retrieved September 30, 2021, from https://admissions.utexas.edu/apply/decisions.

URL:https://admissions.utexas.edu/apply/decisions/holistic-review

Reference:
UT Austin. (2021). Holistic Application Review. Freshman Admission Review | Undergraduate Admissions | The University of Texas at Austin. (n.d.). Retrieved September 30, 2021, from https://admissions.utexas.edu/apply/decisions/holistic-review.

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No discrimination based on race would be included in the American College Personnel Association's (ACPA) (2006) fourth standard - responsibility to society. Student affairs professionals are responsible for improving and promoting community social justice. The primary responsibility is to protect human rights and promote respect for human diversity in higher education (ACPA, 2006).

URL: https://myacpa.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Ethical_Principles_Standards.pdf

Reference:
American College Personnel Association's (ACPA) (2006). Statement of Ethical Principles and Standards. Retrieved https://myacpa.org/wpcontent/uploads/2020/12/Ethical_Principles_Standards.pdffrom

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"Should Racial Information Even Be Collected For College Admissions?" by Richard Vedder, overview if it is needed for colleges or universities to collect racial information.

-The Justice Department demanded that Yale University end what it considers admission preferences for African-American and, to a lesser extent, Hispanic students. As a result, it is disadvantaging whites and Asians.
- Vedder (2020) has asked himself two questions over 50 years, what would happen if it were illegal for a college to ask students or employees wishing to join its community about their race? Or gather racial information in other ways, such as through mandatory in-person interviews, or required photographs from applicants?

People who disagree with Affirmative Action bring up multiple points.

People should be chosen based on merit and not by race.

Minorities from lower classes usually aren't helped by affirmative action, it is mostly those from privileged backgrounds.

Devalues the hard work of many minorities

Reverse discrimination shouldn't be used to fix past discrimination.

People who agree with Affirmative Action have just as many arguments in favor of affirmative action as against it.

To make sure minorities are represented at schools.

Diversity creates a better learning environment.

Discrimination continues to deny opportunities to minorities.

To create an equal opportunity for everyone by helping those individuals with a disadvantage.

- Vedder (2020) believes that regardless if a person is in favor or against it, it should not be ignored. However, the authors recommend viewing it in a different approach aside from just their skin coloration or other physical attributes. For instance, provide additional support such as scholarship assistance to those that genuinely need it. Also, offer different after-school programs to assist students that struggle academically. New ideas are currently implemented, such as enrichment programs or after-school tutoring, but more aid has to be innovated.

URL: https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardvedder/2020/08/24/should-racial-information-even-be-collected-for-college-admissions/?sh=6d222a281fa

Reference:
Vedder, R. (2020, August 24). Should racial information even be collected for college admissions? Forbes. Retrieved September 30, 2021, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardvedder/2020/08/24/should-racial-information-even-be-collected-for-college-admissions/?sh=395c322e1fa5.

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Kutztown, PA - August 19: Johnesha Salata, of Pottstown, PA, helps her roommate's mother, Holy Jo ... [+]
MediaNews Group via Getty Images

A strong case can be made that racial relations in the U.S. are deteriorating, whereas for most of the period after slavery's end in 1865 they were improving, particularly in the middle of the 20th century and for some time thereafter. I liked Gerard Baker's recent Wall Street Journal column where he suggested our obsession with defining everything in terms of race has led to problems, such as the rise of extremists of several racial backgrounds. Instead of moving toward a society where "race does not matter," we are moving closer to one where "only race matters."

This all came to mind recently when the Justice Department demanded that Yale University end what it considers admission preferences for African-American and to a lesser extent Hispanic students, thereby disadvantaging whites and Asians. This led me to ask the question: what would happen if it were illegal for a college to ask students or employees wishing to join its community about their race, or gather racial information in other ways, such as through mandatory in-person interviews, or required photographs from applicants?

My thinking has evolved from over 50 years of researching and writing about American race relations (much of my early scholarship related to the economics of slavery). Although vicious, hateful racial discrimination was rampant for generations after 1865, it started disappearing at an increasing rate in the mid-twentieth century: for example, lynching essentially stopped and Blacks became prominent in such high-paying, visible fields as sports and entertainment.

In a forthcoming essay, I argue that the period of greatest post-Emancipation rise in Black incomes relative to whites was between 1940 and the early 1970s -most of it before civil rights legislation had been passed or had become fully effective. In a competitive market-based economy, true racial discrimination, for example favoring a white job applicant over a more qualified Black one, can be costly -the employer is getting less output per dollar spent. Market principles in fact worked slowly but surely to lower discrimination. By the early 1970s, the median income of black households was around 70% of that of white ones, compared with about 50% as late as 1940.

By 2000, the black to white household median income had risen further, to about 80%. Moreover, racial assimilation has grown rapidly -the number of interracial marriages, for example, has soared. But since 2000, by some indicators, such as household median income, the previous narrowing of inequality has stagnated, at the very time universities increasingly moved away from "affirmative action," involving strongly nudging campus decision-makers to encourage minority participation, to more militant forms of promoting "diversity and inclusion," where race became a primary criterion in such things as admissions.

Hence schools like Harvard, Yale and many others are increasingly facing a real legal dilemma. The zeitgeist of universities, the set of ostensibly shared values, increasingly deviates from a traditional American ideal: achievement and rewards in life should depend more on individual accomplishments rather than one's station in life at birth or on group characteristics which cannot be controlled, like skin coloration. The magisterial admonition of Martin Luther King that what is important is not the color of one's skin but the content of one's character is out of fashion, at least on college campuses.

If the courts start ruling against schools like Harvard or North Carolina in current lawsuits, one logical remedy of alleged racial bias would be to remove race completely from consideration by eliminating racial information. If we truly want a society where "race does not matter" in assessing human qualities, perhaps we need to make it difficult to take race into account. Arguably ignorance is bliss.

This is not to say "ignore the disadvantaged." There are other ways to aid disadvantaged persons in our society, disproportionately members of minority groups, and give them an extra boost, besides looking at their skin coloration or other physical attributes, ways that on balance help the most disadvantaged minorities. Giving generous scholarship assistance to those who are poor is an obvious traditional one. Assisting struggling kids, many of them in racial minorities, with after school tutoring and enrichment programs is another. Eliminating preferential treatment of collegiate legacies in admissions (predominantly favoring whites) is a third.

M y latest book is Restoring the Promise: Higher Education in America.

... Read More

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Should Racial Information Even Be Collected For College Admissions?

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A strong case can be made that racial relations in the U.S. are deteriorating, whereas for most of the period after slavery's end in 1865 they were improving, particularly in the middle of the 20th century and for some time thereafter.

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Slide #13 Bulleted list of Recommendations

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Slide #13 Bulleted list of Recommendations

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According to Maxwell and Garcia (2020), the following are best practices or recommendations for racial equality in college admissions:

1. Continue to support affirmative action in college admissions.
2. Prioritizing diversity and employing race-conscious admissions policies are critical for promoting equity in higher education.
3. Prioritizing diversity in college admissions can improve the representation of historically excluded groups while bolstering all students' educational experiences and economic outcomes.
4. Affirmative action in education promotes diversity so that income alone will be insufficient to promote diversity on college campuses nationwide.
5. Affirmative action helps colleges take steps toward more significant equity in admissions.
6. Affirmative action helps promote social mobility.

URL: https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/race/news/2019/10/01/471085/5-reasons-support-affirmative-action-college-admissions/

Reference:
Maxwell , C., & Garcia, S. (2020, June 18). 5 reasons to support affirmative action in college admissions. Center for American Progress. Retrieved September 30, 2021, from https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/race/news/2019/10/01/471085/5-reasons-support-affirmative-action-college-admissions/.

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Despite their efforts to impede the nation's progress toward educational equity and pit communities of color against each other, leading civil rights groups continue to defend the use of affirmative action, and research continues to demonstrate its need. Race-conscious admissions practices remain necessary in the fight for racial equity in higher education. In this column, we explore five reasons to support affirmative action in college admissions.

1. Students of color remain underrepresented on college campuses

College enrollment and completion rates have risen significantly over the past four decades. However, students of color, especially black and Latinx students, are more underrepresented at selective universities today than they were 35 years ago. In fact, a black student enrollment disparity exists at 45 of the 50 flagship state universities, meaning that the percentage of undergraduates who are black is lower than the percentage of high school graduates in that state who are black. For example, black students constituted 50 percent of 2015-2016 high school graduates in Mississippi, but were just 12.9 percent of University of Mississippi undergraduates.

Banning affirmative action only worsens this persistent problem. For example, one study found that students of color experience a 23 percentage point decline in likelihood of admission to highly selective public colleges after an affirmative action ban goes into effect.

While much progress has been made in recent decades, students of color still remain underrepresented on college campuses nationwide. Prioritizing diversity and employing race-conscious admissions policies are critical for promoting equity in higher education.

2. Prioritizing diversity benefits students of all races

Diversity on college campuses enhances the educational experiences of students of all backgrounds. Evidence gathered by the Century Foundation suggests that racially integrated classrooms can reduce students' racial bias, improve satisfaction and intellectual self-confidence, and enhance leadership skills. These benefits may translate to better economic outcomes and, among other payoffs, prepare students to work in a diverse global economy, increasing the productivity, effectiveness, and creativity of teams.

Institutions of higher education have placed a greater priority on integration and campus diversity in recent decades. White women may have been among the greatest beneficiaries of this effort. Between 1967 and 2009, female college enrollment more than doubled-from 19 percent of all students to 44 percent. During this period, the percentage of white women age 25 to 35 with college degrees surged from less than 15 percent to more than 40 percent.

People of color have also benefited significantly from college integration and efforts to prioritize campus diversity. Between 1976 and 2008, black and American Indian/Alaska Native people saw their share of total college enrollment increase by 39 percent and 46 percent, respectively. Hispanic and Asian/Pacific Islander people's enrollment share more than doubled during this period as well.

Overall, an abundance of evidence demonstrates that systematic efforts to prioritize diversity in college admissions can improve the representation of historically excluded groups while bolstering the educational experiences and economic outcomes of all students.

3. Affirmative action in education promotes diversity in ways a focus on income alone cannot

While income can and should be considered as part of a holistic evaluation of applicants, it should complement rather than supplant the consideration of race and ethnicity. Income can serve as a good indicator of a household's ability to cover regular expenses, but it doesn't tell the whole story about economic well-being and access to higher education.

Wealth makes it easier for families to relocate to better school districts, purchase test preparation books and classes, and pay or help pay college tuition. But centuries of systemic racism and intergenerational transfers have provided white households with far more wealth than households of color, even after controlling for income. In fact, middle-income white households typically have twice as much wealth as their Latinx counterparts and three times more wealth than their black counterparts. As a result, students of color (especially black students) are more likely than similarly situated white students to attend underfunded and high-poverty K-12 schools.

Even when students of color have wealthy parents or attend the same schools as white students, they experience the U.S. educational system differently. For example, students of color are less likely to be referred to "gifted and talented" programs, even after controlling for test scores, health, socio-economic status, and classroom and school characteristics. Schools are also more likely to suspend or expel students of color than white students. Beginning as early as preschool, these experiences can hinder social-emotional and behavioral development; limit educational experiences; obstruct the process of identifying and addressing underlying issues; and contribute to increased family stress and burden due to challenges in finding an affordable and suitable alternative placement. Data also show that race-based bullying is on the rise, and black and Latinx students who experience bullying are more likely to suffer academically than their white peers. Until the racial wealth gap and other forms of structural racism are eliminated, income alone will be insufficient for promoting diversity on college campuses nationwide.

4. Affirmative action helps colleges take steps toward greater equity in admissions

Overall, affirmative action is a mechanism that has allowed historically excluded groups to attend college. Students of color have long faced systemic barriers in the American education system, including exclusion, segregation, underfunding, fewer resources, and lower familial wealth. As a result, students of color are more likely to fare worse on the indicators of success that colleges evaluate for admission, making it harder for people of color to access top-tier public and private colleges. Race-conscious admissions practices, such as affirmative action, attempt to remedy these inequities by encouraging colleges to take a closer look at some of the nontraditional factors that could make a student successful-factors often overlooked in traditional admissions criteria.

Wealthier, often white, students are more likely to have had a parent that attended college-meaning those students are likely to benefit from practices such as legacy preference. In addition, white students are likely to have greater amounts of wealth and attend K-12 schools that provide multiple extracurricular activities, sports programs, and college prep resources. As a result, these students are particularly competitive applicants for top-tier institutions. Affirmative action allows colleges to use holistic reviews to consider race as one of many factors under evaluation when reviewing applicants. Therefore, affirmative action betters the chances of a student of color receiving fair, comprehensive consideration instead of being overlooked for admission.

5. Affirmative action helps promote social mobility

Despite the barriers low-income students and students of color face to gain access to higher education, research has shown that once admitted to top-tier institutions, low-income students complete their degree at higher rates and earn almost as much as wealthy students postgraduation. These findings suggest that all students, regardless of background, benefit from the value top-tier institutions provide. So while some argue that low-income students and students of color may be overwhelmed by the academic rigor at selective colleges, research suggests the opposite.

Affirmative action can help to level the playing field by ensuring all students-regardless of wealth, privilege, or background-have a chance to benefit from the advantages selective colleges provide. As a result, low-income students and students of color increase their chances of emerging from poverty and stepping into the middle class.

Conclusion

For decades, elite colleges and universities closed their doors to students of color. As a result, students of color remain vastly underrepresented at the country's top-tier institutions. Affirmative action combats the effects of this discrimination by allowing colleges and universities to be more intentional in the ways they evaluate applicants. Put simply, affirmative action ensures colleges and universities provide opportunity to those historically shut out of the system because of their race, ethnicity, income, or identity. For this reason, it is critically important that policymakers and legislators work to protect the use of race-conscious admissions policies across the country. If not, inequality will continue to persist, and the American higher education system will fail to serve those that could benefit the most.

Connor Maxwell is a policy analyst for Race and Ethnicity Policy at the Center. Sara Garcia is a former senior research and advocacy manager for Postsecondary Education at the Center for American Progress.

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5 Reasons to Support Affirmative Action in College Admissions

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Race-conscious admissions practices remain necessary in the fight for racial equity in higher education.