Attitudes about Affirmative Action in Higher Education Admissions

ABSTRACT Affirmative action is any policy or program that provides special consideration to historically excluded groups, like racial minorities. Affirmative action in higher education is largely understood as being synonymous with the explicit consideration of college applicants’ race. However, colleges can also give special consideration to racial minorities through the consideration of non-race explicit factors, such as first-generation status or removing legacy admissions. In this work, I use a survey experiment to assess US attitudes toward race explicit and non-race explicit admission factors. I find that regardless of racial identity, parents in the US tend to view colleges that consider ascribed characteristics such as race and legacy status less favorably than colleges that do not consider these characteristics. Colleges may be able to use non-race explicit factors to give consideration to the inclusion of racial minorities with more support from the general public.