Affirmative action, critical mass, and a predictive model of undergraduate student body demographics

Abstract

Black and Latinx students are underrepresented on most public university campuses. At the same time, affirmative action policies are controversial and legally fraught. The Supreme Court has ruled that affirmative action should help a minoritized group achieve a critical mass of representation. While the idea of critical mass is frequently invoked in law and in policy, the term remains ill-defined and hence difficult to operationalize. Motivated by these challenges, we build a mathematical model to forecast undergraduate student body racial/ethnic demographics on public university campuses. Our model takes the form of a Markov chain that tracks students through application, admission, matriculation, retention, and graduation. Using publicly available data, we calibrate our model for two different campuses within the University of California system, test it for accuracy, and make a 10-year prediction. We also propose a coarse definition of critical mass and use our model to assess progress towards it at the University of California-Berkeley. If no policy changes are made over the next decade, we predict that the Latinx population on campus will move towards critical mass but not achieve it, and that the Black student population will decrease, moving further below critical mass. Because affirmative action is banned in California and in nine other states, it is worthwhile to consider alternative policies for diversifying a campus, including targeted recruitment and retention efforts. Our modeling framework provides a setting in which to test the efficacy of affirmative action and of these alternative policies.

Ethnic Disparities in Educational Development: Lessons Learned from Indonesia’s Secondary Education Affirmation Program

“…This is based on the creation of equality, the construction of minorities' access to vertical mobility, and the compensation for various suffered losses. Besides emphasizing the economic class, it is also based on the expansion requirements for race and ethnicity, especially for the critical masses that have experienced years of discrimination (Maes et al, 2021). Meanwhile, the arguments that affirmative action was a disruptive force (Baker, 2019) were not shown in this report.…”

“…Several studies on educational affirmation policy were conducted in the United States and China (Vue et al, 2017;Ding et al, 2017;Maes et al, 2021), and they all focused on increasing the participation of ethnic minorities in higher education. Many countries encountered challenges in the process of increasing the enrollment rates in secondary schools within the Southern Hemisphere.…”

“…After the implementation of affirmative action, a continuous debate is still observed regarding the beneficial status of affirmation, whose policies are designed to increase the representation of minority groups, where historical exclusion or discrimination has been encountered. These groups are often related to gender or ethnicity, with the common areas of exclusion including employment, housing, and education (Maes et al, 2021). Based on the proponents, affirmative action was very important for a multi-ethnic country, due to its equality and justice values, which promoted diversity and the acknowledgment of previous mistakes (Strauss, 2022).…”

A Rites of Passage Counseling Group: Black Panther as a Metaphor of Strength and Resiliency for Young Black Males

“…A further issue, mirroring the idea of critical mass, if a Black CBC did exist, they had to be representative of an entire culture (Van Vleet et al, 2023). Originating from physics, critical mass entails having an adequate representation of people, normally from an underrepresented population (Maes et al, 2021). The concept involves reaching a number in which people have the perception of being individuals as opposed to spokespersons for their race.…”