Race, Class, and College Access: Achieving Diversity in a Shifting Legal Landscape

This is a groundbreaking report examining how legal challenges to race-conscious admissions are influencing contemporary admissions practices at selective colleges and universities around the country. The report is especially timely in light of the U.S. Supreme Court decision to take a second look at the constitutionality of the University of Texas' admissions policy by granting review in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin.Study findings are based on responses to a first-of-its-kind national survey of undergraduate admissions and enrollment management leaders administered in 2014 -- 15. Data reflect responses from 338 nonprofit four-year institutions that collectively enrolled 2.7 million students and fielded over 3 million applications for admission in 2013 -- 14. Among other findings, the authors examine the most widely used and effective diversity strategies; changes in admissions factors after the 2013 Fisher ruling and statewide bans on race-conscious admissions; and the most sought after research and guidance given the current legal and policy landscap

Considering Class: College Access and Diversity

Each time that the continued legality of race-conscious affirmative action is threatened, colleges and universities must confront the possibility of dramatically changing their admissions policies. Fisher v. University of Texas, which the Supreme Court will hear this year, presents just such a moment. In previous years when affirmative action has been outlawed by ballot initiative in specific states or when the Court has seemed poised to reject it entirely, there have been calls for replacing race-conscious admissions with class-based affirmative action. Supporters of race-conscious affirmative action have typically criticized the class-based alternative as ineffective at maintaining racial diversity. This article presents the results of a study conducted at the University of Colorado in 2008 and 2010 that challenges that common assertion. We present a class-based affirmative action policy that led to increased socioeconomic diversity as well as slightly increased racial diversity in two entering freshmen classes. This study, the first done at a moderately selective university, shows how class-based affirmative action can be an effective tool for admitting a class of students that is diverse both socioeconomically and racially. Even if the Supreme Court upholds the constitutionality of race-conscious college admissions, class-based policies are attractive as a supplement to race-conscious policies. The challenges associated with low socioeconomic status are different from those associated with minority status, and there are good reasons to seek equal opportunity along both lines

From Access to Success: Affirmative Action Outcomes in a Class-Based System

Scholarly discussion about affirmative action policy has been dominated in the past ten years by debates over mismatch theory\u27 --the claim that race-conscious affirmative action harms those it is intended to help by placing students who receive preferences among academically superior peers in environments where they will be overmatched and unable to compete. Despite serious empirical and theoretical challenges to this claim in academic circles, mismatch has become widely accepted outside those circles, so much so that the theory played prominently in Justice Clarence Thomas\u27s concurring opinion in Fisher v. University of Texas. This Article explores whether mismatch occurs in the context of a class-conscious affirmative action approach. By moving away from race--which has no logical relationship to mismatch theory--we are able to examine mismatch through a more grounded, less politically laden empirical lens. Our research builds on a previous Article that detailed a class-based affirmative action system implemented at the University of Colorado in Boulder. We examine college outcomes for the beneficiaries of this affirmative action policy, and find that although grades and graduation rates for disadvantaged students lag behind those of their more advantaged peers, the gaps do not widen over time as mismatch theory suggests that they will. Indeed, more often than not, beneficiaries of this policy earn a bachelor\u27s degree. Moreover, Colorado\u27s class-based indices identify some students who perform quite well in college--better than the typical undergraduate--and who would not have been admitted to college without admissions preferences based on class. The Article concludes with implications for affirmative action policy, along with recommendations for supporting academic success for disadvantaged students who have long faced social, economic, and institutional barriers to college access

The positive transcriptional elongation factor (P-TEFb) is required for neural crest specification

Regulation of gene expression at the level of transcriptional elongation has been shown to be important in stem cells and tumour cells, but its role in the whole animal is only now being fully explored. Neural crest cells (NCCs) are a multipotent population of cells that migrate during early development from the dorsal neural tube throughout the embryo where they differentiate into a variety of cell types including pigment cells, cranio-facial skeleton and sensory neurons. Specification of NCCs is both spatially and temporally regulated during embryonic development. Here we show that components of the transcriptional elongation regulatory machinery, CDK9 and CYCLINT1 of the P-TEFb complex, are required to regulate neural crest specification. In particular, we show that expression of the proto-oncogene c-Myc and c-Myc responsive genes are affected. Our data suggest that P-TEFb is crucial to drive expression of c-Myc, which acts as a ‘gate-keeper’ for the correct temporal and spatial development of the neural crest

Proceedings of the 13th annual conference of INEBRIA

CITATION: Watson, R., et al. 2016. Proceedings of the 13th annual conference of INEBRIA. Addiction Science & Clinical Practice, 11:13, doi:10.1186/s13722-016-0062-9.The original publication is available at https://ascpjournal.biomedcentral.comENGLISH SUMMARY : Meeting abstracts.https://ascpjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13722-016-0062-9Publisher's versio

Considering Class: College Access and Diversity

Each time that the continued legality of race-conscious affirmative action is threatened, colleges and universities must confront the possibility of dramatically changing their admissions policies. Fisher v. University of Texas, which the Supreme Court will hear this year, presents just such a moment. In previous years when affirmative action has been outlawed by ballot initiative in specific states or when the Court has seemed poised to reject it entirely, there have been calls for replacing race-conscious admissions with class-based affirmative action. Supporters of race-conscious affirmative action have typically criticized the class-based alternative as ineffective at maintaining racial diversity. This article presents the results of a study conducted at the University of Colorado in 2008 and 2010 that challenges that common assertion. We present a class-based affirmative action policy that led to increased socioeconomic diversity as well as slightly increased racial diversity in two entering freshmen classes. This study, the first done at a moderately selective university, shows how class-based affirmative action can be an effective tool for admitting a class of students that is diverse both socioeconomically and racially. Even if the Supreme Court upholds the constitutionality of race-conscious college admissions, class-based policies are attractive as a supplement to race-conscious policies. The challenges associated with low socioeconomic status are different from those associated with minority status, and there are good reasons to seek equal opportunity along both lines