The Origins of Race-conscious Affirmative Action in Undergraduate Admissions

Abstract

What explains the rise of race-conscious affirmative action policies in undergraduate admissions? The dominant theory posits that adoption of such policies was precipitated by urban and campus unrest in the North during the late 1960s. Based on primary research in a sample of 17 selective schools, we find limited support for the dominant theory. Affirmative action arose in two distinct waves during the 1960s. A first wave was launched in the early 1960s by northern college administrators inspired by nonviolent civil rights protests in the South. A second wave of affirmative action emerged in the late 1960s, primarily as a response to campus-based student protests. Most late-adopting schools were those most favored by the Protestant upper class. Our findings are most consistent with a theoretical perspective on institutional change in which social movements' effects are mediated by the moral and ideological beliefs of key administrators.Why, how, and through what mechanisms were race-conscious affirmative action programs originally instituted in college admissions? The dominant theory, which comes from the sociological literature on institutional change in higher education, attributes the rise of race-conscious affirmative action to two specific types of social disruption during the late 1960s. According to this view, campus protests and urban riots in the North posed a powerful new threat to the symbolic legitimacy of the social order. College administrators resolved the problem by incorporating racial considerations into the admissions process. Under this theory, race-conscious affirmative action was prompted by social upheavals in the late 1960s that precipitated a cultural shift in the permissibility of race-sensitive policies. This theory is widely influential, but the empirical evidence to substantiate it is limited.Our article contributes to the literature by analyzing the origins of race-conscious affirmative action in a nonrandom purposive sample of 17 highly selective undergraduate institutions. Drawing on new

Standardizing Biases: Selection Devices and the Quantification of Race

“…In the first half of the twentieth century, selective colleges turned toward quantified assessments of academic merit to identify promising (white) students from less affluent backgrounds (Lemann 1999). Inspired by the civil rights movements of the early 1960s, some selective colleges also began to engage in programs of affirmative action to increase the enrollment of nonwhite students (Stulberg and Chen 2014). These practices spread such that by the mid-1990s, approximately 60 percent of selective colleges claimed to consider race in admissions (Hirschman and Berrey 2017).…”

“…Like some peer institutions, Michigan began pursuing a policy of intentionally recruiting minority (especially Black) students in the mid-1960s (Stulberg and Chen 2014). At the time, Black students represented just .1 percent of the student body.…”

The Partial Deinstitutionalization of Affirmative Action in U.S. Higher Education, 1988 to 2014

“…Race-conscious admissions practices were first voluntarily adopted in the early 1960s by prestigious universities in the north, where top administrators took inspiration from the Southern civil rights movement's challenge to deep-seated racial inequalities (Stulberg and Chen 2014). By 1972, affirmative admissions for black students was commonly practiced at predominantly white selective colleges and universities (Grodsky 2007).…”

“…Scholarly attention has largely mirrored these political and legal controversies. The organizational research literature on race-conscious admissions policies has focused on the most elite private and public institutions (Lipson 2001;Lipson 2007;Berrey 2015;Hirschman, Berrey, and Rose-Greenland 2016), which were the first to adopt race-conscious admissions (Karabel 2005;Stulberg and Chen 2014). With a handful of exceptions (e.g., Grodsky and Kalogrides 2008), this research tends to infer the logic of the entire field of higher education from analyses of the admissions practices of elite institutions.…”

The Partial Deinstitutionalization of Affirmative Action in U.S. Higher Education, 1988-2014

“…Scholarly attention has largely mirrored these political and legal controversies. The organizational research literature on race-conscious admissions policies has focused on the most elite private and public institutions (Lipson 2001;Lipson 2007;Berrey 2015;Hirschman, Berrey, and Rose-Greenland 2016), which were the first to adopt race-conscious admissions (Karabel 2005;Stulberg and Chen 2014). With a handful of exceptions (e.g., Grodsky and Kalogrides 2008), this research tends to infer the logic of the entire field of higher education from analyses of the admissions practices of elite institutions.…”