Attitudes about Affirmative Action in Higher Education Admissions

ABSTRACT

Affirmative action is any policy or program that provides special consideration to historically excluded groups, like racial minorities. Affirmative action in higher education is largely understood as being synonymous with the explicit consideration of college applicants’ race. However, colleges can also give special consideration to racial minorities through the consideration of non-race explicit factors, such as first-generation status or removing legacy admissions. In this work, I use a survey experiment to assess US attitudes toward race explicit and non-race explicit admission factors. I find that regardless of racial identity, parents in the US tend to view colleges that consider ascribed characteristics such as race and legacy status less favorably than colleges that do not consider these characteristics. Colleges may be able to use non-race explicit factors to give consideration to the inclusion of racial minorities with more support from the general public.

KEYWORDS:

• affirmative action
• attitudes
• race
• college admissions
• survey experiment

Disclosure Statement

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

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Notes

1. Subsequent cases, like Grutter reference Bakke as likely precedent because so many universities took notice and shifted their practices to align.

2. California (1996), Washington (1998), Florida (1999), Michigan (2006), Nebraska (2008), Arizona (2010), New Hampshire (2012), Oklahoma (2012), Idaho (2020).

3. It is important to note, however, that parents may be more or less involved. as the work associated with applying to college may fall more squarely on the shoulders of low-income and racially minoritized students (Rowan-Kenyon, Bell, and Perna 2008).

4. Detailed information about the cover story is presented in Appendix A.

5. The exact graphics and stories about racial demographics designed to minimize and maximize racial threat are presented in Appendix A.

6. An example of how this page looked is included in Appendix A.

7. Participants could access a definition for what each of these terms meant in terms of what colleges considered. For example, if they didn’t understand what alumni status meant there was a guide that said the college considered whether a parent or grandparent had attended.

8. See graphics to demonstrate the appropriateness of this strategy in Appendix A (Figure A1 and A2).

9. I also ran supplementary analyses without controls, not included here, and results were the same.

10. Examples of these four statements are included in Appendix A.

11. Participants with more kids had more negative attitudes about colleges that considered alumni status; separated participants viewed schools that considered race more favorably; and those who are liberal view test scores less favorably.

12. The tables and coefficients associated with all figures are presented in Appendix A (Table A1-A4). Keep in mind that you cannot compare coefficients’ direction or statistical significance directly and this is why I completed additional tests for racial difference using the SUEST command and report those as found in the text. I complete these necessary tests using the SUEST command in STATA as described in the analytic section.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amy L. Petts

Amy Petts has a PhD in sociology from Purdue University and works as library assessment manager at Ball State University. She studies how racial processes structure educational opportunities and works to elucidate pathways to greater educational equity.