Is Affirmative Action in Decline or Out of Control?

InsideHigherEd
October 9, 2008

With voters in Colorado and Nebraska preparing to vote on proposals to bar affirmative action, supporters and defenders of the consideration of race in admissions decisions are releasing new research to bolster their positions.
The Center for Equal Opportunity — a group that has worked for years to bar the consideration of race and ethnicity — on Wednesday issued findings about admissions to the law school at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. Those data show significant race and ethnicity gaps in the LSAT scores and college grades of applicants who were admitted in recent years to the law school.
At the same time, two sociologists have just published an analysis suggesting that affirmative action is in decline — and has never been as widespread as some imagine in states that have barred the use of race in admissions decisions.
‘The Declining Significance of Race’
For all the debate about the consideration of race in admissions, and the Supreme Court’s ruling that colleges may continue to do so (in some circumstances), a new article in the American Journal of Education (University of Chicago Press) builds on earlier research by the authors to show that affirmative action is in decline in American higher education.
Eric Grodsky of the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and Demetra Kalogrides of the University of California at Davis have been analyzing data from the College Board on colleges’ admissions policies and have previously documented that since 1995, the percentage of colleges considering race has been falling — regardless of the impact of various state bans on affirmative action.
Their new study builds on this research, and finds that affirmative action — far from being as widespread in higher education as its critics portray — isn’t the norm. By 2003, only about one third of private colleges nationally and of public institutions without legal prohibitions on affirmative action said that they considered race in admissions, the study finds.
In addition, they note that the prevalence of affirmative action isn’t necessarily a cause for the movement to abolish it. In 1986, prior to the state bans that started to appear because of court rulings and referendums, 44 percent of colleges in states that would eventually ban affirmative action said that they considered race in admissions. In the rest of the country, that percentage was 57 percent.
That institutions pulled back in both groups of states isn’t surprising, the authors write, even though colleges in most states didn’t face the direct necessity to do so. “As the legal environment changes, or even as it is perceived to change, risk-averse institutions may simply abandon or repackage their affirmative action programs to avoid scrutiny, abandoning race-conscious admissions as one component of a broader effort to continue to attract diverse classes of students.” [To read the entire story, go to: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/10/09/affirm ]