Tag: affirmative action

Brett Kavanaugh once predicted ‘one race’ in the eyes of government. Would he end affirmative action?

The following article by Ann E. Marimow was posted on the Washington Post website August 7, 2018:

The Post’s Robert Barnes explains some of the factors that could influence whether Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh is confirmed. (Video: Monica Akhtar/Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

In the spring of 2015, Brett M. Kavanaugh returned to his alma mater in New Haven, Conn., to address the Black Law Students Association. The student who introduced him said Kavanaugh was concerned that African Americans and other minorities were being shut out of coveted clerkships with federal judges like him.

Kavanaugh concluded the session by handing out his email address and phone number and encouraging the Yale students to apply. Indeed, two of Kava­naugh’s four law clerks this year were African American students he met during annual visits to Yale, and Kavanaugh and his supporters have touted his record of hiring young lawyers from diverse backgrounds to work with him at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

“It was important to him that everyone have access,” recalled Rakim Brooks, who introduced the judge that day and completed a year-long clerkship with him this summer just as President Trump announced Kava­naugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court.

View the complete article here.

New Federal Data Show America Still Needs to Improve College Access

The following article by Ben Miller was posted on the Center for American Progress website July 12, 2018:

College students walk between classes on their campus in New York, February 2017. Credit: AP, Bebeto Matthews

It’s tempting to think that America has largely solved its problems surrounding access to postsecondary education. The rate at which recent high school graduates enroll in college is around an all-time high. There are more Americans who have started college—but have not finished—than Americans who have dropped out of high school. These trends have increasingly helped shift postsecondary education policy discussions toward issues of retention and completion.

While getting college students to graduation is critical, new federal data show that the United States still fails miserably at providing equitable access to learning beyond high school, particularly in terms of socio-economic status. Students from the lowest levels of socio-economic status (SES) enroll in college at a rate that’s 60 percent the level of their best-off peers. When they do enroll, they are far more likely to attend a nonselective college or pursue something less than a bachelor’s degree. This is particularly striking for black students in the highest SES group, who are still half as likely to attend a highly selective college as their white peers. And this story does not hinge on academic ability: The least-affluent students with good grades and scores on an assessment of math skills enroll in college at about the same rate as the best-off students with middling academic accomplishments.

These findings come from the latest follow-up to the National Center for Education Statistics’ High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (HLS). The survey tracks more than 23,000 students who were in ninth grade in 2009, showing how many enrolled in or completed college by February 2016.

View the complete article on the Center for American Progress website here.

Who’s Taking College Spots From Top Asian Americans? Privileged Whites.

The following article by Daniel Golden was posted on the ProPublica website August 9, 2017:

The Trump administration is preparing to investigate whether Asian Americans are treated unfairly as a result of admissions policies intended to boost the chances of other racial minorities. That inquiry should also look at colleges’ other major affirmative action effort — lower admission standards for applicants whose parents are alumni or major donors.

This story was co-published with Bloomberg View.

Harknes Tower stands on the Yale University campus in New Haven Connecticut (Craig Warga/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

More than a decade ago, I chatted with Asian-American seniors at Hunter College High School in New York City about their college admission prospects. One young woman told me she had scored 1530 out of a maximum 1600 on the SAT. When I congratulated her, she said that her score was what she and her friends called “an Asian fail.” She predicted it wouldn’t be enough to get into her dream school, Yale. She was right. The next day, she learned that Yale had rejected her.

I remembered our conversation when I read last week that the Justice Department plans to investigate a complaint by Asian-American organizations that Harvard discriminates against them by giving an edge to other racial minorities. My immediate response was: right victim, wrong culprit.

Asian Americans are indeed treated unfairly in admissions, but affirmative action is a convenient scapegoat for those who seek to pit minority groups against each other. A more logical target would be “the preferences of privilege,” as I called them in my 2006 book, “The Price of Admission.” Continue reading “Who’s Taking College Spots From Top Asian Americans? Privileged Whites.”

y Justice Department plans new project to sue universities over affirmative action policies

The following article by Sari Horwitz and Emma Brown was posted on the Washington Post website August 1, 2017:

The Trump administration is targeting affirmative action policies at universities under a new initiative in the Justice Department. (Claritza Jimenez/The Washington Post)

Justice Department officials are planning a new project to investigate and sue universities over affirmative action admissions policies they determine discriminate against white applicants, according to a U.S. government official.

The project will be based out of the department’s civil rights division, which is now looking for lawyers interested in working on “investigations and possible litigation related to intentional race-based discrimination in college and university admissions,” according to a person familiar with an internal announcement in the civil rights division. Continue reading “y Justice Department plans new project to sue universities over affirmative action policies”