The Effects of Racial Preferences in Higher Education on Student Outcomes
Next month, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Fisher v. University of Texas, the first case the Court has taken up in a decade on the use of race in higher education admissions. The case has generated ninety-two amicus briefs, one of the highest totals for any Supreme Court case in history. The Court is expected to issue a ruling in the high-stakes case that restricts racial preferences more sharply than its 2003 rulings in Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger. As opposed to 2003, many of the arguments in the current affirmative action debate focus not on the competition between races for spots at an elite school, but on whether racial preferences actually benefit their recipients.
On September 21, the Governance Studies program at Brookings hosted a half-day conference examining new research on the actual effects of racial preferences upon students. Do racial preferences help more blacks and Hispanics become scientists and engineers, or do they push students away from STEM majors? Do they tend to increase or decrease minority graduation rates? How do they affect student learning? Did California’s ban on racial preferences in the 1990s change enrollments by black and Hispanic students or affect their grades and graduation rates?
After each panel, participants took audience questions.
Agenda
8:45 am - Welcome and Introduction
Richard Sander
Professor of Law - UCLA
9:00 am - Empirical Inference and the Effects of Admissions Preferences
Kala Krishna
Liberal Arts Research Professor, Department of Economics - Penn State University
Veronica Robles
Economist - Inter-American Development Bank
E. Douglass Williams
Wilson Chair of Economics - Sewanee: The University of the South
Kate Antonovics
Lecturer, Economics - UC San Diego
10:30 am - The Phenomenon of “Science Mismatch”
Richard Sander
Professor of Law - UCLA
Peter Arcidiacono
Professor of Economics - Duke University
Frederick Smyth
Research Assistant Professor, Psychology - University of Virginia
Marc Luppino
Economist - Federal Trade Commission
12:00pm - Luncheon Roundtable: Research, Preferences Reform, and <em>Fisher v. University of Texas</em>
Peter Schmidt
Senior Writer - Chronicle of Higher Education
Phillip Richards
Professor of English - Colgate University
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