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The effects of affirmative action on the incentives to human capital accumulation are ambiguous from a theoretical perspective and the scarce empirical evidence on the matter provides mixed results. In this paper, we address this issue by investigating the impacts of Brazil's Law of Quotas on the students' performance in the college entrance exam, the ENEM. We provide causal evidence that the law fostered incentives to pre-college human capital accumulation, inducing students to attain higher ENEM scores. Moreover, the effects of the quotas were greater in quantitative-intensive subjects and these impacts increased throughout the first years after the law's implementation.

In "Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College ("SFFA")," the United States Supreme Court revisited an issue that had been litigated before it twenty years earlier. In two separate cases brought against the University of Michigan, the issue was whether it was a violation of the Constitution and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for the university to use "race" as a factor in student admissions. On June 23, 2003, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, writing for a 5-4 majority in "Grutter v. Bollinger," declared that it was not. For the past two decades, according to the author, relying on Justice O'Connor's deeply-flawed reasoning in "Grutter" schools across the country, including service academies, have openly used race to benefit certain applicants and to racially discriminate against others. Fast forward twenty years, according to the author, and they remain perplexed by the continuing support for these divisive policies. The author states they had always assumed the compelling interest in having an effective military demanded that the military recruit and train the very best officers it could attract, irrespective of race.

The chairman of the drafting committee of the modern Indian Constitution, Dr Bhim Rao Ambedkar, emphasized that education cultivates democracy in society, strengthens the roots of democracy, and brings about social transformation. The social transformation includes a way of life that will promote liberty, equality, and fraternity, which are Dr Ambedkar's "key elements of an ideal society". This paper discusses the implications for higher education campuses for achieving an ideal society in light of the emerging evidence on peer group formation around identities and issues of discrimination associated with caste in the context of increasing student diversity. The paper also emphasizes the important role of a civic-learning approach to higher education; meaning an active engagement with values of liberty, equality, and fraternity. There is a shared belief that higher education has a great potential to be a social laboratory for civic learning and to inculcate democratic values and foster peaceful interactions among members of diverse groups.

Affirmative action in education is once again in the media and cultural spotlight. The Trump administration, along with a decidedly rightward shift on the Supreme Court, signal a bleak outlook for affirmative action policies in higher education. However, as educators, we can also use this historical moment to have robust and critical conversations in our classrooms centered on advancing justice and interrogating the polemics of meritocracy--a concept that undergirds much of the affirmative action narrative. This paper seeks to provide social justice-oriented educators with the critical tools necessary to have meaningful classroom conversations about the historical and contemporary narrative of the affirmative action debate.

Affirmative Action is a contested concept in the United States (U.S.). "Fisher v. the University of Texas" (UT) is a key recent case focused on Fisher, a White woman, an alleged victim of discrimination. Fisher spurred online discussion about race as a factor in university admissions. The authors analyzed 13,158 tweets using #StayMadAbby utilizing critical discourse analysis and thematic analysis surrounding Affirmative Action in university admissions. The results and discussion frame Affirmative Action discourse as a racial project. The content of #StayMadAbby demonstrates that social media can connect people experiencing marginalization, encourage discussion, and engender participation as an exercise of collective resiliency.

Immigrant Chinese Americans made the recent polling news by being the least racially tolerant in comparison to other Asian American groups over redistributive issues such as college admissions. Rather than treating Chinese immigrants as of monolithic interests and ultimately unassimilable, this study seeks to provide a more nuanced understanding of the contours and sources of their racial attitudes and beliefs. How do new immigrants from China think of issues of race, race relations, and notions of racial equality and justice in multiracial America? What explains their patterns of racial attitudes and opinions especially the controversial issue of race-based college admissions? These are the main research questions we asked through semistructured interviews conducted in Mandarin of 15 undergraduate students from China studying in STEM, social sciences, and humanities in a public research university on the West Coast. We hypothesize that the formation of racial attitudes of U.S. undergraduate students from China is influenced by their own upbringing in China as well as personal experiences of discrimination, local school context, interracial contacts, media exposure, and classroom learning of U.S. racial history on both sides of the Pacific. These experiences, in turn, help structure their perceptions of the dominant ideology, racial beliefs, and race-based policy preferences in the host society of the United States. Our findings confirm prior research on racial learning but also offer new insights on the contours and sources of racial policy opinion on affirmative action in college admissions.

The South African government recently adopted an education policy that attempts to achieve socio-economic redress through expanding free university education to first-year students from low-income backgrounds. However, in a country in which structural factors such as race, gender, and age continue to shape labor market outcomes, to what extent can attainment of university education significantly improve the labor market outcomes of historically marginalized groups? To evaluate the limits and possible unintended consequences of this policy intervention, I use nationally representative data from 1994 through 2017 to explore the correlation between a bachelor's degree and the likelihood of unemployment. Using a logistic regression and predicted probabilities, I show that, despite the existence of a race-based affirmative action policy designed to alleviate structural barriers in South Africa's labor market, structural factors still significantly attenuate the role of university education in enabling labor force participation among historically marginalized groups. I term the effect of these multi-dimensional structural barriers: the social unemployment gap. These findings suggest that the use of university education as a strategy for socio-economic redress in labor markets characterized by structural asymmetries extending beyond race necessitates the existence of intersectional labor market affirmative action policies.

This study investigates the associations between statewide affirmative action bans and the racial composition of undergraduate students at public 4-year colleges and universities in five states, that is, Arizona, Michigan, Nebraska, New Hampshire, and Oklahoma. I use the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System data from 1999 to 2017, and find that despite having few selective postsecondary institutions, public four-year institutions in these five states experienced an average decline of 0.42 percentage points in the enrollment of underrepresented racial-ethnic minority students following bans on affirmative action. Further, the bans also decreased the enrollment of underrepresented racial-ethnic minority students at four state public flagship universities.

This paper addresses critical issues related to student support and how different departments define inclusivity for graduate students in the context of American higher education. A four-framed, comprehensive, tripartite model is provided to guide institutions by assisting graduate school administrators, who are charged with improving inclusiveness regarding academic programs and departments. This model suggests services and support in precise ways by delineating the different needs that programs have. Finally, this manuscript concludes with a discussion on encouraging programs and departments to deliberate on why they value diversity.

The primary focus of affirmative action is attempting to correct unjust discrimination that has occurred over an extended period of history. The focus of this research will primarily be on affirmative action in higher education. The primary method of implementation has been through admissions practices that utilize racial identity as a factor in their overall formula for acceptance to the university. These practices have been in place at universities for almost as long as the debate on affirmative action has been occurring, and shifted over time along with the entire debate on affirmative action. Unfortunately, discussions and debates about the history and implementation of race-conscious admissions have lost touch with the main foundation of affirmative action, improving equity in a higher education system with barriers for communities that were historically marginalized. This paper will bring the current debate back to this focus through an argument in favor of affirmative action. First, this article will contextualize the political and social foundation and trace the legal history of affirmative action through significant court cases. From this historical foundation, a proposed directive grounded in feminist and critical race theory will assert the importance of affirmative action in higher education and emphasize the founding concepts of redistribution and equity.

This article examines how Affirmative Action was used to govern access to higher education for the disadvantaged. In 1991, a gender-based Affirmative Action policy was incorporated into college admission in Uganda. Using existing empirical data at district and college levels, the article accounts for the categories of women for whom the Uganda's Affirmative Action policy is most effective. The study found that Affirmative Action had a substantial effect. Sixty-six per cent of the sampled population would not have been admitted, had it not been for Affirmative Action. But the policy did not work for the historically disadvantaged; it worked for specific categories of women from specific regions, districts and high schools; on grounds that it was implemented for competitive reasons. The study provides relevant lessons for policy making in countries grappling with the challenges of high socio-economic inequality and higher returns to higher education.

Racisms are plural, taking different forms in different countries, subject to change in focus and intensity over time. Colonialism and slavery influence attitudes and policies in both countries through to modern times. In examining the British and American contexts, one needs to particularise by (a) country, (b) ethnicities, (c) histories, (d) contemporary economic forces which sustain racisms and (e) anti-racist and decolonising practices in the school curriculum, instructional relationships and wider public education contexts. Racisms are about power and exploitation, generally exercised by a White population through the devaluing of minorities and denial of their rights, needs and pain. Despite Civil Rights laws and Affirmative Action, the USA has a brand of racism that is at times barbaric, extreme and recurrent, bolstered by discriminatory law and law enforcement. Britain's racisms, despite Race Relations Acts, discriminate across a range of sectors with interventions funded which have been too limited, seldom sustained and with variable impacts. Until attributes of 'Whiteness' are openly interrogated, the folk histories of the countries rebalanced, the school curriculum reconsidered and historical roots for contemporary 'erasure of Black suffering' are recognised, 'White premium' will persist. That is the challenge to public pedagogies in educational establishments and the wider society.

This autoethnographic cross-case study articulates a set of field-tested strategies, focusing on how White-dominated teacher-preparation programs (TPPs) could recruit a greater number of teacher educators who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) by actively designing, implementing, and modeling equity-conscious recruitment practices. The conceptual framework describes the instrumental value that BIPOC teacher educators bring to Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs) by drawing on a sociocultural assets-based view of racially diverse professionals in historically White settings. Methods involved a directed approach to content analysis of 50 search-related documents across 10 faculty searches that the author facilitated between the years 2009-2018 that led to all-BIPOC hires. The findings focus on three major milestones during a typical faculty search with an emphasis on the contexts of TPPs: (a) planning for equitable and inclusive practices from start to finish through a model of shared accountability, (b) encouraging search committees to actively engage in innovative approaches to recruitment, including traditional and non-traditional strategies, and (c) supporting stakeholders, such as committee members and voting faculty who have direct or indirect decision-making power in faculty searches, in reducing cognitive errors throughout the evaluation and selection process. Implications are offered for practice and theory.

Through a critical discourse analysis of online comments to a "New York Times" newspaper article about "Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College," this study explores how public comments about affirmative action offer insight into larger racial discourses about college admissions. Findings indicate that public opinion frames higher education as a privilege, suggesting either White students or people who are not Black are most deserving of admission to selective colleges. Comments often invoked racist ideas about which students deserve a college education. Implications relative to college access for racially minoritized students are considered.

Drawing on the notions of neoliberal governmentality, regime of subjectification, as well as on the ordoliberal conception of social policy, self and class, I analyse how neoliberalism is entrenched in the formation of the affirmative action policy in higher education in Chile. Based on a fieldwork focused on the two main affirmative action programmes in Chile--Induction Access Programmes and PACE--, I constructed a counter-archival assemblage to identify the main policy agents creating opportunities to extend and implement affirmative action programmes and mobilising specific conditions to enact entrepreneurial technologies in the design of affirmative actions. Two related entrepreneurial technologies of the self, namely, managerial leadership and ontological coaching, were identified. They were part of a regime of neoliberal subjectification unfolded in the mandatory modules to harness the working-class students' affective entrepreneurial vitalities as both the true ontology of their selves and the desirable features that make them the legitimate and responsible subjects of right to higher education.

Youth movements rose in Brazil in the past decade, fighting for equitable access to education alongside plural -- anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and feminist -- struggles. This article examines interactions by which Brazilian youth activists organise, politicise, and define who constitutes a movement. It focuses on a 2019 public hearing to defend race- and class-based affirmative action. Taking a discursive analytic approach situated within a broader ethnographic study, the findings highlight the collective nature of youth practices and identity. Youth activists shape a sense of belonging by emphasising 'we' and 'us' pronouns in a speech; develop audience co-authorship as they listen and chant together; and co-construct chants before initiating them in the crowd. The analysis contributes to understanding hybrid (on- and offline), multimodal educational practices and interactions in movements as youth articulate race, generation/age, class, and place. In doing so, youth construct collective identity and generate movement power.

In this research article, Pamela R. Bennett and Amy Lutz offer new hypotheses about how state bans on affirmative action affect application decisions based on students' beneficiary positions vis-à-vis affirmative action and evaluate them for black, white, Latino, and Asian American students separately. They posit that bans discourage applications to selective colleges from prospective students who benefit from affirmative action (black and Latino) and encourage applications from prospective students who do not benefit from the policy (white and Asian American). Members of nonbeneficiary groups that have strong academic credentials are more responsive to bans because they are best positioned for admission under restrictions on race-conscious admissions policies. Citing results from the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002--2006, the authors show how state restrictions on race-conscious admissions have contributed to racial inequality in higher education by further drawing into elite institutions' application pools racial groups that already account for most of their students while also raising the chances that students from those groups will be admitted.

This paper seeks to identify strategies for anti-racist higher education, drawing on scholarship that locates structural racism in global and local centre-periphery relations. We first examine how the centre-periphery divide has been identified and challenged in anti-racist intellectual and political movements, focusing on exchanges and solidarity between peripheral territories. We then discuss the implications of this framework for the setting in which the authors work: Brazilian higher education. The Brazilian university sector has recently expanded through affirmative action policies that have resulted in an influx of Black students from urban peripheries. However, the dominant nationalist ideology in Brazil has historically denied racial divisions, presenting a myth of racial democracy and delegitimising transnational links between anti-racist movements. Reflecting on our own experiences and perceptions through a narrative approach, we draw out elements of border thinking that we believe can contribute to anti-racist pedagogical and institutional relationships.

As a fast-growing population in US. society, Asian Americans, particularly Chinese Americans, have started to engage more actively and amplify their presence in the recent legal challenges to affirmative action in college admissions. In order to get a deeper understanding of how US.-based Chinese view affirmative action, we conducted a textual content analysis informed by Critical Discourse Studies (CDS) to analyze comments on several articles surrounding affirmative action published on a WeChat news outlet, "ChineseAmericans." Findings centre around misconceptions of affirmative action driven by different translations of the term from English to Chinese, along with Chinese cultural exceptionalism. This study adds to an emerging body of literature on public perceptions of affirmative action within the Chinese and Chinese immigrant community, whose voices have either been overlooked completely or critiqued as solely pawns in a larger quest to eliminate affirmative action.

In December 2019, the institutional affirmative action "Onde elas estão?" ("Where are they?") was launched for the mitigation of gender inequality in the STEM disciplines in Brazil, coincidentally in the same period which the first reports of the COVID-19 pandemic appeared in the city of Wuhan, China. Unfortunately, when evaluating the initiative through different approaches belonging to the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Respect (DEIR) theories, the presence of implicit biases and the invisibility of underrepresented minorities was observed. Approximately 77.5% of the female scientists participating in the initiative were white and belonging to the wealthiest regions (75%) and with the greatest contribution to Brazil's Gross Domestic Product (GDP). On the other hand, Black, Indigenous, and Asian female chemists were not identified, nor were female chemists belonging to the North Region (Brazilian Amazon Region). The DEIR practice "Onde elas estão?" has an important role in the dissemination of highly qualified Brazilian female chemists and provides an important source of engagement and sense of community for future generations of female students to avoid abandoning STEM subjects. However, adjustments are needed that take into account greater Diversity, Inclusion, Equity, and Respect.

Affirmative Action in higher education exemplifies interest convergence, and beyond this, interest divergence and imperialistic reclamation. Diversity initiatives, such as the Inclusive Excellence initiative, have adopted key strategies and reasoning developed in Affirmative Action Supreme Court cases. This paper shows how semantic concessions and co-options within Supreme Court cases and in Inclusive Excellence scholarship have moved the focus of higher education diversity programs from access for Students of Color to educational benefits for white students. I show how current diversity initiatives are based on false premises with legal precedent. I frame these semantic concessions and co-options within imperialistic reclamation and discuss the implications.

According to the authors of "Higher Education for American Democracy," the role of education in a democratic society "is not merely to meet the demands of the present" but to "serve as an instrument of social transition" (p. 6). A democratic university should be a living model of democracy that could embody the civic ambitions of a nation. The focus in this article is on one such model: the University of California, Riverside (UCR), in the last decades of the 20th century. The author's year-long (2016-2017) ethnographic study of UCR examined the workings of all campus units, from finance to facilities, academic advising to cultural centers. What was discovered offers a keyhole glimpse into the larger racial and financial politics shaping higher education throughout the United States at present. Considering UCR in detail helps to identify what a more democratic higher education could look like, how we might get there, and what might stand in the way.

This paper examines educational segregation in the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro through the lens of a multifaceted centreperiphery relationship involving geographical, racial and historical dimensions. The paper first situates Brazilian racial inequalities historically, drawing on decolonial theory, before examining student enrolment patterns in Brazil's second-largest metropolis. Although Brazil is often held to be a racially integrated society, the analysis shows sharp racial and social divisions between a 'peripherally' oriented mass public school system, a 'centrally' oriented private sector, and selective public schools run by the federal government. The selective public sector is undergoing a period of transition, driven by affirmative action policies, and provoking tensions that are examined through the experiences of two politically-engaged teachers. The findings point to the importance of political mobilisation in effecting change and the need for further affirmative action policies, along with a revised funding model for public schooling.

Despite being academically unqualified for admission to the University of Texas at Austin, Abigail Fisher, a White female, argued that she was not admitted due to the university's diversity policy. In addition to framing postsecondary admissions as a zero-sum phenomenon, Ms. Fisher intentionally frames students of color who are admitted to the University of Texas at Austin as academically unqualified. The purpose of this article is to examine Ms. Fisher's arguments against the University of Texas' diversity policy as presented in "Fisher v. University of Texas" from a critical race theoretical perspective. In addition to obfuscating the fact that admission to the top colleges and universities in the United States has become more competitive, Ms. Fisher's anti-diversity arguments are also consistent with a racial ideology and socially conservative agenda that frames people of color as undeserving of the opportunities traditionally associated with White people. The goal of this article is not only to situate "Fisher v. University of Texas" as a strategic project of Whiteness, but to also discuss what critical race theory can still teach scholars and researchers concerned with racial inequality in education.

Some of the nation's most prominent colleges and universities have abandoned their affirmativeaction-based admission policies and adopted race-neutral affirmative action as a result of twolawsuits against the University of Michigan, which threaten the availability of undergraduate andgraduate program access to applicants of color. In this article, an overview "Grutter v. Bollinger"and "Gratz v. Bollinger" is provided. Futhermore, the authors identify how "Grutter v. Bollinger" hasspecifically impacted other institutions.

As the political arena becomes increasingly polarized, the legal arena is playing a more important role in the creation of education policy in the United States. One critical stage in the legal process for such efforts is at briefing where "amici curiae," or friends-of-the-court, may introduce additional arguments for the court to consider through the filing of "amicus curiae" briefs. To explore the use of extra-legal sources by "amici," we focus on the 2013 U.S. Supreme Court case "Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin" and ask the questions: (1) What are the types, and relative use by "amici," of extra-legal sources cited in the briefs submitted in "Fisher I?"; and (2) What is the relative use of extralegal sources cited in "amicus" briefs by supporting party and by category of "amici?" Our findings reveal the wide-range of extra-legal sources used in "amicus" briefs, and that the type of extra-legal sources incorporated may be associated with who the "amici" are and which party they support. Ultimately, we discuss potential reasons for the differences observed in the use of extra-legal sources and offer recommendations to more effectively engage in the policy briefing process.