Social Science Research Group Deems Race-conscious Admissions Most Effective Path to Diversity - Higher Education

Social Science Research Group Deems Race-conscious Admissions Most Effective Path to Diversity - Higher Education: The U.S. Supreme Court should continue to allow the narrow use of race in college admissions because it achieves diversity in ways that race-neutral policies cannot, a group of social science researchers argued Thursday during a briefing on the soon-to-be heard Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin case.

“Some say you could do this by relying on social class … . We tried that,” said Dr. Gary Orfield, Professor of Education, Law, Political Science and Urban Planning at UCLA and co-director of The Civil Rights Project at UCLA.

The shortcoming of class-based affirmative action, Orfield said, is that it fails to account for the fact that children from middle-class Black and Latino families still end up attending inferior K-12 public schools in poorer neighborhoods more than Whites from similar backgrounds and thus have a distinctly different pre-college experience.