affirmative action research paper

Affirmative Action: Foundations and Key Concepts

This non-exhaustive reading list discusses the origins of affirmative action, the question of race vs. class, and the effects of meritocracy.

Affirmative action seeks to increase the representation of women and minorities in employment and education, spaces where they have been historically excluded. However, the discussion of preferential treatment based on racial or socioeconomic status has ignited intense public controversy, as highlighted through the college admissions scandal. The scandal exposed the underlying tensions between class and race in the United States, exhibiting the ways in which privilege is opposed to fairness.

The following non-exhaustive reading list discusses the origins of affirmative action, the question of race- versus class-based affirmative action, and the effects of meritocracy in admissions.    

The Origins of Affirmative Action  

Tierney, William G. “The Parameters of Affirmative Action: Equity and Excellence in the Academy.” Review of Educational Research , 1997

Tierney provides a historical analysis of affirmative action in higher education. Why was it needed as a policy? He then outlines the philosophical and legal ramifications of affirmative action before evaluating criticism and alternatives. He concludes that affirmative action should not be about rewriting past wrongs. Rather, the goal is to develop policies that serve the public good by advancing diversity and facilitating a culture of public participation.

Stulberg, L., & Chen, A.  “The Origins of Race-conscious Affirmative Action in Undergraduate Admissions: A Comparative Analysis of Institutional Change in Higher Education.” Sociology of Education , 2014

This comparative and institutional analysis of race-conscious affirmative action policies found that affirmative action arose in two waves during the 1960s. The first wave of adoption occurred in the early 1960s, by colleges in the North that were inspired by the nonviolent civil rights protests occurring in the South. The second wave of adoption emerged in the late 1960s as a response to student protests on campus.

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Race- vs. Class-Based Affirmative Action

Bok, Derek. “Assessing the Results of Race-Sensitive College Admissions.” The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education , 2000

Derek Bok, the former president of Harvard University, discusses race-based affirmative action in college admissions. After studying more than 60,000 students, the author learned that most minority students attending selective colleges would have been rejected under a “race-neutral” admissions process. Bok assesses the different policy alternatives, like class-based affirmative action and top 10 percent plans. However, he concludes that these policies likely would not lead to the creation of racially diverse classes. He concludes that race-conscious admissions are the only solution that achieves diversity by admitting the best qualified minority students.

Cancian, Maria. “Race-Based versus Class-Based Affirmative Action in College Admissions.” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management , 1998

Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, Cancian tries to simulate the impact of moving away from a race-based admissions process to class-based affirmative action by examining whether racial and ethnic minorities would be eligible for a class-based program. A class-based college admissions process likely would bound the eligibility of racial and ethnic minorities and would not have similar results to race-based affirmative action.

Holzer, H., & Neumark, D. “ Affirmative Action: What Do We Know?” Journal of Policy Analysis and Management , 2006

This research report evaluates the effects of affirmative action on employment, college admissions, and government contracting. The empirical evidence shows that affirmative action programs shift employment, admissions, and government contracting away from white men and toward women and other minorities. However, these shifts in employment and college admissions do not have significant or large effects on the representation of minorities in colleges and university programs. Holzer and Neumark note that replacing race-based affirmative action with a different set of policies based on income or class rank likely would reduce the number of minorities enrolled at selective colleges.

Malamud, Deborah. “Assessing Class-Based Affirmative Action.” Journal of Legal Education , 1997

Malamud discusses why class-based affirmative action will likely not achieve economic equity in higher education. She also discusses why a class-based admission process is  less likely to achieve racial equality.

Sander, Richard. “Experimenting with Class-Based Affirmative Action.” Journal of Legal Education , 1997

Sander discusses how UCLA School of Law incorporated class-based preferences into its admissions system and then evaluates the results. He discusses how the class preference system increased the socioeconomic diversity of the student body but had mixed results in preserving racial diversity.

The Challenges of Meritocracy

Liu, Amy. “Unraveling the myth of meritocracy within the context of US higher education.” Higher Education , 2011

Liu argues that in meritocracy, social status becomes intertwined with level of education. Colleges and universities are now the gatekeepers of class positions and access to them will determine future class status. Liu discusses how higher education should serve as an instrument to expand opportunity and not be reduced to a “defensive necessity.” She signals that it is important for researchers to examine the theoretical basis of meritocracy and its consequences in higher education.

Espenshade, T., Chung, C., & Walling, J. “Admission Preferences for Minority Students, Athletes, and Legacies at Elite Universities.” Social Science Quarterly , 2004

Espenshade, Chung, and Walling examine the college admissions process and the preferences for athletes, children of alumni, and minority applicants. The authors note how elite universities give additional weight to different characteristics in which academic preferences for athletes and legacies often compete with the preference for minority applicants.

Critical Race Theory

Yosso, T., Parker, L., Solórzano, D., & Lynn, M. “From Jim Crow to Affirmative Action and Back Again: A Critical Race Discussion of Racialized Rationales and Access to Higher Education.” Review of Research in Education , 2004

Using the framework of critical race theory, the authors discuss the role of race and racism in shaping educational institutions. They also discuss how color-blind, diversity, and remedial legal rationales are shaped by race and racism, underlining how conservatives challenge affirmative action based on a “colorblind” rationale, where race-blind admissions ensure meritocracy. Liberals, on the other hand, defend affirmative action based on a diversity rationale, where minority students enrich the learning environment for white students. The remedial rationale wishes to grant minority groups access as a partial remedy for past and current discrimination.

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The Case for Affirmative Action

• Posted July 11, 2018
• By Leah Shafer

For decades, affirmative action has been a deeply integral — and deeply debated — aspect of college admissions in the United States. The idea that colleges can (and in some cases, should) consider race as a factor in whom they decide to admit has been welcomed by many as a solution to racial inequities and divides. But others have dismissed the policy as outdated in our current climate, and at times scorned it as a form of reverse racial discrimination.

That latter stance gained a much stronger footing last week when the Departments of Education and Justice officially withdrew Obama-era guidance on affirmative action, signaling that the Trump administration stands behind race-blind admissions practices.

We spoke with Natasha Warikoo , an expert on the connection between college admissions and racial diversity, about what affirmative action has accomplished in the past 50 years, and whether this shift in guidance will severely affect admissions policies in the years to come. We share her perspectives here.

The purpose of affirmative action:

Affirmative action was developed in the 1960s to address racial inequality and racial exclusion in American society. Colleges and universities wanted to be seen as forward-thinking on issues of race.

Then, in the late 1970s, affirmative action went to the United States Supreme Court. There, the only justification accepted, by Justice Powell, was the compelling state interest in a diverse student body in which everyone benefits from a range of perspectives in the classroom.

Today, when colleges talk about affirmative action, they rarely mention the issue of inequality, or even of a diverse leadership. Instead, they focus on the need for a diverse student body in which everyone benefits from a range of perspectives in the classroom.

Colleges have fully taken on this justification — to the point that, today, they rarely mention the issue of inequality, or even of a diverse leadership, perhaps because they’re worried about getting sued. But this justification leads to what I call in my book a “ diversity bargain ,” in that many white students see the purpose of affirmative action as to benefit them , through a diverse learning environment. This justification, which ignored equity, leads to some unexpected, troubling expectations on the part of white students.

What affirmative action has accomplished in terms of diversity on college campuses:

William Bowen and Derek Bok’s classic book The Shape of the River systematically looks at the impact of affirmative action by exploring decades of data from a group of selective colleges. They find that black students who probably benefited from affirmative action — because their achievement data is lower than the average student at their colleges — do better in the long-run than their peers who went to lower-status universities and probably did not benefit from affirmative action. The ones who benefited are more likely to graduate college and to earn professional degrees, and they have higher incomes.

So affirmative action acts as an engine for social mobility for its direct beneficiaries. This in turn leads to a more diverse leadership, which you can see steadily growing in the United States.

But what about other students — whites and those from a higher economic background? Decades of research in higher education show that classmates of the direct beneficiaries also benefit. These students have more positive racial attitudes toward racial minorities, they report greater cognitive capacities, they even seem to participate more civically when they leave college.

None of these changes would have happened without affirmative action. States that have banned affirmative action can show us that. California, for example, banned affirmative action in the late 1990s, and at the University of California, Berkeley, the percentage of black undergraduates has fallen from 6 percent in 1980 to only 3 percent in 2017 . 

Decades of research in higher education show that classmates of the direct beneficiaries of affirmative also benefit. They have more positive racial attitudes toward racial minorities, they report greater cognitive capacities, they even seem to participate more civically when they leave college.

What the Trump administration's reversal of guidance on affirmative action means for admissions practices:

The guidance is simply guidance — it’s not legally binding. It indicates what the administration thinks, and how it might act. In that sense, this guidance is not surprising — many would have guessed that Trump and his team believe universities should avoid taking race into consideration in admissions. Indeed, the Department of Justice under Trump last summer already reopened a case filed under the Obama administration claiming racial discrimination in college admissions.

I hope that colleges and universities will stand behind affirmative action, given its many benefits. The U.S. Supreme Court has decided in favor of affirmative action multiple times — it is settled law.

However — the decision in Fisher v. Texas made clear that colleges would no longer be afforded good faith understanding that they have tried all other race-neutral alternatives before turning to affirmative action. In other words, if asked in court, colleges need to be able to show that they tried all other race-neutral alternatives to creating a diverse student body, and those alternatives failed. This means that affirmative action has already been “narrowly tailored” to the “compelling state interest” of a diverse student body — required by anti-discrimination laws. Ironically, race-based decisions come under scrutiny because of anti-discrimination laws designed to protect racial minorities; these laws are now being used to make claims about supposed anti-white discrimination when policies attempt to address racial inequality.

Additional Resources

• Read our 2016 Q+A with Warikoo following the Fisher v. Texas decision
• Listen to Warikoo discuss the Trump administration's reversal on a recent WBUR interview
• More background on the Trump administration's policy shift on affirmative action.

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• Published: 27 December 2023
• Volume 37 , pages 25–56, ( 2024 )

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• Mathieu Bunel 1 &
• Élisabeth Tovar   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-4224-1702 2  

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In this paper, we provide evidence on attitudes toward indirect past-in-present educational discrimination (i.e., educational discrimination that took place in the past but has a negative impact on the current employment opportunities of the discriminated against workers). We use an original vignette-based hypothetical survey experiment and collect data from a representative sample of the US population. We find that a significant majority of respondents support costly compensation for past educational discrimination. Moreover, we find that respondents are as sensitive to indirect past-in-present educational discrimination as they are to present-day employment discrimination. We point out that the causal effects on attitudes are stronger for the intentionality of discrimination than for its financial consequences for the discriminated group. Finally, attitudes appear to be driven more by respondents' political perspective than by their own actual identity.

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Students for Fair Admissions, Inc., v. President and Fellows of Harvard College 20 U.S. 1199 (2023) and Students for Fair Admissions, Inc., v. University of North Carolina, et al. 21 U.S. 707 (2023).

The survey was administered between June 2019 and January 2020 on US respondents via the online platform SurveyMonkey and received 788 valid questionnaires. SurveyMonkey is a well-known panelist that is often used to administer online surveys: for recent examples, see Rizzo et al. ( 2021 ) and Schomakers et al. ( 2019 ).

See Harrison et al. ( 2006 ) for a comprehensive typology of affirmative action policies.

The American College Test (ACT) is an equivalent and competing test.

In 2019, a suit was filed against the University of California on the grounds that the SAT-based admission system discriminated against applicants on the basis of race, wealth, disability and mother tongue. In May 2020, the university decided to stop using SAT scores for admissions from the autumn semester of 2021 (Kroichick, 2020 ).

According to the Census Bureau, real median disposable income in the USA was around USD 2,800 per month in 2018.

A full survey on affirmative action programs is well beyond the scope of this paper. The paper focuses on one of these mechanisms. For an enlightening typology of affirmative action programs, see Harrison et al. ( 2006 ). For comprehensive reviews, see Arcidiacono et al., 2013 ; Hinrichs, 2012 , 2014 ; Holzer & Neumark, 2006 ; Kellough, 2006 ; and Page & Scott-Clayton, 2016 .

Parents v. Seattle and Meredith v. Jefferson (2007), Fisher I $\&$ II (2013; 2016), Students for Fair Admissions, Inc., v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and the University of North Carolina, et al. (2023). See (Wallace & Allen, 2016 ) for a discussion of the 2007–2016 rulings.

i.e., the elite selection process described in the survey is simply adapted in order to exactly compensate the effects of past educational discrimination.

Hypothetical vignette-based experimental surveys (following the terminology of Haaland et al., 2023 ) are also often simply called “factorial surveys” or “vignette surveys” in the literature.

Other approaches, such as testing studies and laboratory experiments, share this same experimental and causal nature, but focus on behaviors, not attitudes. We believe that behavior- and opinion- oriented studies are complementary. Beyer & Liebe ( 2015 ) have shown the fruitfulness, to study discrimination, of using vignette-based hypothetical experimental surveys as complements for behavior-oriented experimental protocols. Further, Gutfleisch et al. ( 2021 ), Hainmueller et al. ( 2015 ) and Petzold & Wolbring ( 2019 ) provide evidence that determinants of behaviors might be inferred from behavioral intentions measured with survey experiments. Last but not least, Riach & Rich ( 2004 ) argue that deceptive field experiments of discrimination may be questionable from an ethical point of view. All in all, compared to behavior-oriented experiments, we believe that survey experiments are a valuable complement, if not substitute.

To minimize biographical bias, the situation is deliberately decontextualized by locating the scene in a far away and peaceful galaxy where humans and many alien races coexist peacefully (See Appendix 1 for the full version of the vignette).

In the vignette, the members of the discriminated group miss the extra training opportunity because they are culturally obliged to stay at home for ritual periods during their adolescence. Note that the Manta survey was designed in the spring of 2019 and conducted between September 2019 and January 2020. It precedes the COVID-19 epidemic, which forced a large share of the world population to experience confinement first-hand. It also precedes the #BlackLivesMatter civil rights protests that took place in 2020 in the United States and elsewhere in the world.

We chose to place the vignette in a neutral context with regard to the respondents' own experience (a faraway planet with an explicitly alien population) to maximize this distinction.

Sauer et al. ( 2011 ) showed that hypothetical vignette-based experimental surveys are applicable in general population samples, provided that a limited number of vignettes and dimensions per respondent were used.

https://fr.surveymonkey.com .

“ In the next page, you'll find a story where a character needs to make a decision. You'll be asked which choice is, in YOUR opinion, the best from a moral point of view. Please read carefully the story in order to make YOUR decision: there are no good or bad answers! After, there are very brief questions about you. These will allow us to compare the answers of all the people that will complete the survey. All in all, the survey takes about 3–4 min to complete. ".

SurveyMonkey’s pool of respondents was stratified by age, gender, income, US region and device used to complete the survey. Table 2 shows that our working sample is not representative of the 18 years old + US population. To mitigate this issue, results presented in Sect. " Results " were obtained using sampling weights stratified by gender, age and race, using data from the 2019 US Census.

White = self-declared White or Caucasian; non-White = self-declared American Indian or Alaskan Native, Asian or Pacific Islander, Black or African American, Hispanic or Latino.

Some higher education = some college, no degree; a college degree or equivalent; a bachelor's degree; a master's degree; a professional degree or doctorate (e.g., MD, DDS, DVM); a doctorate (PhD, EdD).

See Models 1 and 2 of Table  4 in Appendix 3 for details. A comparison of models 2 and 3 in Table  4 of Appendix 3 shows that results do not differ according to whether we include only sociodemographic covariates without the point-of-view variable / sociodemographic and point of view covariates.

See Models 3 to 7 in Table  4 of Appendix 3 for detailed results.

See Models 4 to 7 in Table  4 of Appendix 3 for detailed results.

See Models 4 and 5 in Table  4 of Appendix 3 for detailed results.

Insignificant effects and large confidence intervals could be due to sample size issues.

See models 4 and 5 in Table  4 in Appendix 3 for detailed results.

We found not significant results when interacting directly the respondents’ identity and ideology characteristics with the “point of view” variables in the main regressions presented above (but this could be due to sample size issues). Detailed results are available upon request.

See Table  5 of Appendix 4 for detailed results.

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This paper benefited from an ANR JCJC grant (ANR JCJC JEM 2015) and from funding from the CEPREMAP.

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Appendix 1. Full Text of the Survey’s Vignette

Imagine a far away galaxy where Humans and many alien races live peacefully.

Tom is the Human manager of a recruitment agency. This job is Tom’s only source of income. This year, SpaceTravel, a big intergalactic firm, is Tom's only client. SpaceTravel asks Tom to run a selection process to find qualified navigators for its spaceships.

On average, half of the candidates are successful and become navigators for SpaceTravel.

[Financial Consequences for the Discriminated Group]

[None: #1 and 4] Tom knows that the candidates who fail the selection process will be quickly hired by other firms and will earn the same income as candidates who were successful.

[× 2 wage loss: #2, 3, 5 and 6] Tom knows that a SpaceTravel navigator earns twice the income of a candidate who failed the selection process.

Candidates can only apply to the SpaceTravel selection process once in their life, just after high school. All the high schools organize short training courses where their pupils can get familiar with the very specific flight simulators used by SpaceTravel during its selection process.

Among all the galactic races that apply to the selection process, 100 candidates are Tenka aliens. The Tenka have a specific tradition: The young Tenka must stay at home during short ritual periods.

[Discrimination Intent]

[Deliberate: #1, 2, and 3] Knowing this, the school administrators have deliberately set the training courses at times when the Tenka pupils could not attend. This way, they want to make sure that very few Tenka will successfully complete the selection process.

[Involuntary: #4, 5, and 6] This cultural specificity prevents them from enrolling in the specific flight simulator training.

SpaceTravel asks Tom to start the selection immediately after the high school year. Tom knows that, contrary to all the other candidates, the Tenka candidates could not get familiar with the flight simulators. Personally, Tom equally cares about all the alien races. In his opinion, they are all equally capable of being efficient navigators for SpaceTravel.

[Sanction of the Firm for Discriminating]

No sanction [#1, 2, 4 and 5] < no additional text > 

Government sanction [#3 and 6] The galactic government makes sure that all firms provide the same job opportunities to everyone. The government financially sanctions the firms that do not respect this principle.

In your opinion, from a moral point of view, what should Tom do? Knowing your opinion will not affect Tom's decision.

Scenarios without any Sanction of the Firm for Discriminating [#1, 2, 4 and 5]

[Discrimination] Start the selection process immediately after the high school year for everybody, knowing that the Tenka will not have had any opportunity to learn to use the flight simulators. Because of that, no Tenka candidate will successfully become a navigator. In this case, Tom will not lose any income.

[Compensation] Delay the selection process to give the Tenka enough time to learn how to use the flight simulators. In this case, 50 Tenka will become navigators. But, because of the delay, Tom will have to pay a penalty and lose half of his income.

Scenarios with a Sanction of the Firm for Discriminating [#3 and 6]

[Discrimination] Start the selection process immediately after the high school year for everybody, knowing that the Tenka will not have had any opportunity to learn to use the flight simulators. Because of that, no Tenka candidate will successfully become a navigator. In this case, SpaceTravel will pay Tom the full amount of income due. Also, the government will impose a heavily financial penalty to SpaceTravel because of the high failure rate of the Tenka.

[Compensation] Delay the selection process to give the Tenka enough time to learn how to use the flight simulators. In this case, 50 Tenka will become navigators. But, because of the delay, Tom will have to pay a penalty and lose half of his income. In this case, the government will not sanction SpaceTravel.

Appendix 2. Subsample Structure

The tests presented in Table  3 check the comparability of the subsamples of respondents who were shown the different versions of the vignette.

Appendix 3. Marginal Effects of Covariates (Linear Probability Model)

Table 4 below shows the results obtained using a linear probability model. The discrete explanatory variable is the respondent's opinion on whether the IPP educational discrimination should be compensated by delaying the selection at the expense of the recruiter or by going ahead with the original schedule (variable compensate = yes (reference), no).

Models 1 and 2 are run for respondents who received scenarios 2 and 7 to explore the causal impact of the temporality of the discrimination on their choices. In Model 1, the only explanatory variable is the temporality of the discrimination (variable past-in-present = IPP discrimination (reference factor), discrete discrimination in the present).

Model 2 adds individual covariates on identity, ideology and identification of the respondents:

Identity covariates: gender (= male (ref), female), race (= white (ref), non-white), age (= under 30, between 30 and 60 (ref), over 60), education (= no higher education (ref), higher education), income (= less than $50,000/year, between $50,000-$149,999/year (ref), more than $150,000/year).

Ideology covariate: political opinion (= liberal, conservative (ref), neither liberal nor conservative)

Identification covariate: viewpoint (= all agents (ref), candidates from the discriminated group, other agents).

Models 3 to 7 are run for respondents who received scenarios 1 to 6 to explore the causal impact of intention, financial consequences and government sanctions on respondents' choices. They're also used to explore the relationship between individual characteristics and opinions on compensation for IPP discrimination.

Model 3 includes a variable combining the intention to discriminate (intentional or unintentional) and the financial consequences of discrimination for the discriminated group (yes, no) (reference factor = unintentional discrimination with no financial loss), as well as a dummy variable for the existence of government sanctions against companies that discriminate (= no, yes (ref)). Model 4 adds identity and ideology covariates. Model 5 adds an identification covariate.

Models 6 and 7 include a variable combining the intention to discriminate (intentional or unintentional) and the existence of government sanctions on firms that discriminate (yes, no) (reference factor = unintentional discrimination without government sanction), and a dummy variable for the financial impact of discrimination on the discriminated group (= no (ref), yes). Model 6 includes no other covariates and Model 7 includes both identity, ideology and identification covariates.

Appendix 4. Respondent Characteristics and Point of View

To explore whether identity variables are correlated with the point of view chosen by the respondent to make their choice on the compensation of IPP, we use a multinomial logit model.

Let \(Y\) be a nominal outcome variable equal to.

0 if the respondent stated that they identified the most with applicants from the discriminated group

1 if they identified the most with all the characters of the vignette

2 if they identified the most with other characters (the hiring agent, the hiring firm, or applicants from non-discriminated groups)

Let \({\text{Pr}}\left(Y=j \mid X\right)\) with \(j=0,...,2\) be the probability that the respondent is equal to \(j\) conditional of covariates \(X\) .

We compute marginal effects to identify the socio-economic variables that influence the point of view chosen by respondents when making their choice.

Since we have only discrete covariates, the marginal effect is computed as the difference in predicted probabilities.

For instance, in the case of a dichotomic covariate, the marginal effect of covariate X k  would be computed as:

With  X -k  the other covariates. We find significant effects for gender, age, educational level and political opinions (see Table  5 over).

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Bunel, M., Tovar, É. When is Affirmative Action Fair? Answers from a Hypothetical Survey Experiment. Soc Just Res 37 , 25–56 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-023-00429-3

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Affirmative Action and Pre-College Human Capital

Racial affirmative action policies are widespread in college admissions. Yet, evidence on their effects before college is limited. Using four data sets, we study a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that reinstated affirmative action in three states. Using nationwide SAT data for difference-in-differences and synthetic control analyses, we separately identify the aggregate effects of affirmative action for whites and for underrepresented minorities. Using state-wide Texas administrative data, we measure the effect of affirmative action on racial gaps across the pre-treatment test score distribution. When affirmative action is re-instated, racial gaps in SAT scores, grades, attendance, and college applications fall. Average SAT scores for both whites and minorities increase, suggesting that reductions in racial gaps are driven by improvements in minorities' outcomes. Increases in pre-college human capital and college applications are concentrated in the top half of the test score distribution.

We gratefully acknowledge funding from the Lab for Economic Applications and Policy and the Connaught Fund. The Texas Education Agency and a large urban school district provided invaluable administrative data for this project. We are grateful to Josh Angrist, Peter Blair, Roland Fryer, Brent Hickman, Caroline Hoxby, Asim Khwaja, Louis-Philippe Morin, Phil Oreopoulos, Sarah Reber, Alex Whalley, Wesley Yin, and seminar and conference participants at the NBER Summer Institute, IZA, Harvard, Brown, UCL, UBC, Purdue, Clemson, Collegio Carlo Alberto, the Ohlstadt workshop, CEA, University of Calgary, and UCLA for their helpful comments. We also thank Graham Beattie for his help with the newslibrary.com database. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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Americans and affirmative action: How the public sees the consideration of race in college admissions, hiring

The term “affirmative action” has a long history in the United States. One early reference appears in an executive order that President John F. Kennedy signed in 1961 , directing federal contractors to “take affirmative action” to prevent discrimination against job applicants and employees on the basis of race or other factors.

Today, affirmative action generally refers to programs aimed at boosting educational or employment opportunities for racial and ethnic minority groups that historically have faced discrimination. But the idea has sparked many debates in recent years . Some Americans see these programs as an effective way to address past wrongs and increase racial and ethnic diversity in higher education and the workplace. Others view them as discriminatory in their own right.

Here’s a closer look at what recent surveys have found about Americans’ views of affirmative action, both in a broad sense and in specific settings.

Pew Research Center published this backgrounder about affirmative action in the United States because the issue is currently in the news. The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to decide a high-profile case in the weeks ahead about the consideration of race and ethnicity in college admissions decisions.

All public opinion findings cited here come from surveys conducted by the Center or Gallup. Information about the field dates and sample sizes of each survey, as well as additional methodological details, are available by following the links in the text.

For more detailed information about how Americans see the consideration of race and ethnicity in college admissions decisions, read our recent reports: “More Americans Disapprove Than Approve of Colleges Considering Race, Ethnicity in Admissions Decisions” and “Asian Americans Hold Mixed Views Around Affirmative Action.”

How familiar is the public with affirmative action?

In a December 2022 Pew Research Center survey, around eight-in-ten U.S. adults (79%) said they had ever heard the phrase “affirmative action.”

College graduates, those with higher incomes and older people were among the groups most likely have heard the term. For instance, 90% of Americans 65 and older said they had heard the phrase, compared with 65% of those ages 18 to 29. White and Black adults were also more likely than Asian or Hispanic adults to have heard the phrase.

How do Americans feel about affirmative action?

Public attitudes about affirmative action depend on how Americans are asked about it.

Americans who had heard the phrase affirmative action in the Center’s December survey were asked whether they saw it as a good or a bad thing. Among those who had ever heard the term, 36% said affirmative action is a good thing, 29% said it is a bad thing and a third weren’t sure.

By comparison, Gallup has asked U.S. adults whether they “generally favor or oppose affirmative action programs for racial minorities.” In 2021, the last time Gallup asked this question, a 62% majority of Americans favored such programs .

Public attitudes about affirmative action can also vary depending on the specific context in which it is being discussed, such as in higher education or the workplace.

How do Americans view race and ethnicity as a factor in college admissions?

A larger share of Americans disapprove than approve of higher education institutions taking race and ethnicity into account when admitting students, according to several recent Center surveys.

In a survey conducted in spring 2023 , half of U.S. adults said they disapprove of selective colleges and universities taking race and ethnicity into account in admissions decisions in order to increase racial and ethnic diversity. A third of adults approved of this, while 16% were not sure.

In the same survey, 49% of Americans said the consideration of race and ethnicity makes the overall admissions process less fair, while only 20% said it makes the process fairer. Another 17% said it does not affect the fairness of the admissions process, while 13% said they weren’t sure.

Other Center surveys have also found more opposition than support for the consideration of race and ethnicity in college admissions decisions.

In the December 2022 survey, for example, 82% of U.S. adults said colleges should not consider race or ethnicity when deciding which students to accept, while only 17% said colleges should take this into account. Americans were far more likely to say that colleges should consider other factors, particularly high school grades and standardized test scores.

How do Americans view race and ethnicity as a factor in hiring?

Most Americans say companies should not take race and ethnicity into account when hiring or promoting workers, according to a 2019 Center survey .

In that survey, 74% of U.S. adults said that, when making decisions about hiring and promotions, companies and organizations should take only a person’s qualifications into account, even if it results in less diversity. Around a quarter (24%) said companies and organizations should take a person’s race and ethnicity into account – in addition to qualifications – to increase diversity.

While most Americans disapprove of the consideration of race and ethnicity in hiring and promotion decisions, they still see value in a diverse workplace. Three-quarters of adults said in the 2019 survey that it was very or somewhat important for companies and organizations to promote racial and ethnic diversity in their workplace. Around a quarter (24%) said this was not too or not at all important.

How do Americans view recent efforts related to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in the workplace? While public attitudes on DEI efforts in the workplace are much more positive than negative, a sizeable share of Americans say it is neither good nor bad, according to a February 2023 Center survey of employed Americans .

In the survey, 56% of workers said that, in general, focusing on increasing diversity, equity and inclusion at work is mainly a good thing, while far fewer (16%) said it is a bad thing. Another 28% said it is neither good nor bad.

Still, relatively few workers attached a great deal of importance to diversity in their workplace. Only about a third (32%) said it’s extremely or very important to them to work somewhere with a mix of employees of different races and ethnicities.

How do attitudes on these topics vary by race and ethnicity? Racial and ethnic minorities – especially Black Americans – are more likely than White Americans to support the consideration of race and ethnicity in college admissions and hiring decisions.

In the Center’s spring 2023 survey, around half of Black adults (47%) approved of selective colleges considering race and ethnicity in their admissions decisions, compared with 39% of Hispanic adults, 37% of Asian adults and 29% of White adults. In fact, Black adults were the only racial or ethnic group more likely to approve than disapprove of such efforts. Hispanic adults were evenly divided, while Asian and White adults were more likely to disapprove than approve. (These figures refer only to English-speaking Asian adults. For a closer look at views among Asian Americans – including those who do not speak English – read our recent report, “Asian Americans Hold Mixed Views Around Affirmative Action.” )

When it comes to hiring and promotion decisions in the workplace, about four-in-ten Black adults (37%) said in the Center’s 2019 survey that companies and organizations should take a person’s race and ethnicity into account – in addition to their qualifications – in order to increase diversity. Hispanic (27%) and White (21%) adults were less likely to express this view. (There were not enough Asian adults in the survey sample to report their results separately.) Are there partisan differences on these issues?

Yes. Democrats are far more likely than Republicans to approve of colleges and employers considering race and ethnicity.

In the Center’s spring 2023 survey, more than half of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (54%) approved of selective colleges and universities taking race and ethnicity into account when making admissions decisions. Roughly three-quarters of Republicans and Republican leaners (74%) disapproved.

There were also wide partisan differences over how the consideration of race and ethnicity affects the college admissions process. Democrats were divided over whether it makes the overall admissions process fairer or less fair (33% and 30%, respectively, held these views). But by a margin of 70% to 7%, Republicans said it makes the process less fair.

In the 2019 survey about hiring and promotion decisions, majorities of Democrats and Republicans alike said companies and organizations should take only a person’s qualifications into account, even if it results in less diversity. But Republicans were far more likely than Democrats to express this view (90% vs. 62%).

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John Gramlich is an associate director at Pew Research Center

Striking findings from 2023

Private, selective colleges are most likely to use race, ethnicity as a factor in admissions decisions, asian americans hold mixed views around affirmative action, more americans disapprove than approve of colleges considering race, ethnicity in admissions decisions, hispanic enrollment reaches new high at four-year colleges in the u.s., but affordability remains an obstacle, most popular.

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Are Minority Students Harmed by Affirmative Action?

Subscribe to the brown center on education policy newsletter, matthew m. chingos matthew m. chingos former brookings expert, senior fellow, director of education policy program - urban institute.

March 7, 2013

Affirmative action is back in the news this year with a major Supreme Court case, Fisher v. Texas. The question before the Court is whether the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause permits the University of Texas at Austin’s use of race in its undergraduate admissions process. The Court may declare the use of racial preferences in university admissions unconstitutional when it decides the case in the coming months, potentially overturning its decision in the landmark Grutter case decided a decade ago.

Accompanying the general subject of affirmative action in the spotlight is the “mismatch” hypothesis, which posits that minority students are harmed by the very policies designed to help them. Justice Clarence Thomas made this argument in his dissent in the Grutter case: “The Law School tantalizes unprepared students with the promise of a University of Michigan degree and all of the opportunities that it offers. These overmatched students take the bait, only to find that they cannot succeed in the cauldron of competition. And this mismatch crisis is not restricted to elite institutions.”

The mismatch idea is certainly plausible in theory. One would not expect a barely literate high-school dropout to be successful at a selective college; admitting that student to such an institution could cause them to end up deep in debt with no degree. But admissions officers at selective colleges obviously do not use affirmative action to admit just anyone, but rather candidates they think can succeed at their institution.

The mismatch hypothesis is thus an empirical question: have admissions offices systematically overstepped in their zeal to recruit a diverse student body? In other words, are they admitting students who would be better off if they had gone to college elsewhere, or not at all? There is very little high-quality evidence supporting the mismatch hypothesis, especially as it relates to undergraduate admissions—the subject of the current Supreme Court case.

In fact, most of the research on the mismatch question points in the opposite direction. In our 2009 book , William Bowen, Michael McPherson, and I found that students were most likely to graduate by attending the most selective institution that would admit them. This finding held regardless of student characteristics—better or worse prepared, black or white, rich or poor. Most troubling was the fact that many well-prepared students “undermatch” by going to a school that is not demanding enough, and are less likely to graduate as a result. Other prior research has found that disadvantaged students benefit more from attending a higher quality college than their more advantaged peers.

A November 2012 NBER working paper by a team of economists from Duke University comes to the opposite conclusion in finding that California’s Proposition 209, a voter-initiated ban on affirmative action passed in 1996, led to improved “fit” between minority students and colleges in the University of California system, which resulted in improved graduation rates. The authors report a 4.4-percentage-point increase in the graduation rates of minority students after Proposition 209, 20 percent of which they attribute to better matching.

At first glance, these results appear to contradict earlier work on the relationship between institutional selectivity and student outcomes. But the paper’s findings rest on a questionable set of assumptions, and a more straightforward reanalysis of the data used in the paper, which were provided to me by the University of California President’s Office (UCOP), yields findings that are not consistent with the mismatch hypothesis.

First, the NBER paper uses data on the change in outcomes between the three years prior to Prop 209’s passage (1995-1997) and the three years afterward (1998-2000) to estimate the effect of the affirmative action ban on student outcomes. Such an analysis is inappropriate because it cannot account for other changes occurring in California over this time period (other than simple adjustments for changes in student characteristics).

A key problem with the before-and-after method is that it does not take into account pre-existing trends in student outcomes. This is readily apparent in Figure 1, which shows that the graduation rates of underrepresented minority (URM) students increased by about four percentage points between 1992-1994 and 1995-1997, before the affirmative action ban. The change from 1995-1997 to 1998-2000 was smaller, at about three percentage points. The NBER paper interprets this latter change as the causal impact of Prop 209, but this analysis assumes that there would have been no change in the absence of Prop 209. If the prior trend had continued, then graduation rates would have increased another four points—in which case, the effect of Prop 209 was to decrease URM graduation rates by one percentage point.

Adjusting for student characteristics does not change this general pattern. The adjustment makes no difference in the pre-Prop 209 period, but explains about 36 percent of the increase in the immediate post-Prop 209 period (which is consistent with the NBER paper’s finding that changes in student characteristics explain 34-50 percent of the change). But if the 1992-1994 to 1995-1997 adjusted change was four points, and the 1995-1997 to 1998-2000 adjusted change was one point, then Prop 209 might be said to have a negative effect of three percentage points.

None of these alternative analyses of the effect of Prop 209 should be taken too seriously, because it is difficult to accurately estimate a pre-policy trend from only two data points. The bottom line is that there probably isn’t any way to persuasively estimate the effect of Prop 209 using these data. But this analysis shows how misleading it is in this case to only examine the 1995-1997 to 1998-2000 change, while ignoring the prior trend.

Second, the NBER paper finds that less-selective universities produce better outcomes among minority students with weaker academic credentials. This must be the case in order for “mismatch” to exist, but it runs counter to most prior research on the subject. The one exception is a 2002 study by Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger, which found no impact of college selectivity on earnings except among students from low-income families. However, the methodology of the Dale-Krueger study severely limits the relevance of its results for students and policymakers.

In order to control for unobserved student characteristics, Dale-Krueger control for information about the institutions to which students applied and were accepted. This takes into account potentially valuable information that is observable by admissions committees but not the researcher. But it is problematic because it produces results that are based on comparisons between students who attended more or less selective colleges despite being admitted to the same set of institutions. As Caroline Hoxby explains : “since at least 90 percent of students who [were admitted to a similar group of schools] choose the more selective college(s) within it, the strategy generates estimates that rely entirely on the small share of students who make what is a very odd choice.” In other words, the method ignores most of the variation in where students go to college, which results from decisions about where to apply.

The problem with the NBER paper is that it uses a variant of the Dale-Krueger method by controlling for which UC campuses students applied to and were admitted by. And the UCOP data are consistent with Hoxby’s argument: in 1995-1997, 69 percent of URM students attended the most selective UC campus to which they were admitted and 90 percent attended a campus with an average SAT score within 100 points of the most selective campus that admitted them (the corresponding figures for all UC students are 72 and 93 percent).

A more straightforward analysis is to compare the graduation rates of URM students with similar academic preparation and family backgrounds who attended different schools. The mismatch hypothesis predicts that URM students with weak qualifications will be more likely to graduate, on average, from a less selective school than a more selective one.

The data show the opposite of what mismatch theory predicts: URM students, including those with less-than-stellar academic credentials, are more likely to graduate from more selective institutions. I calculate graduation rates by individual campus that are adjusted to take into account SAT scores, high school GPA, parental education, and family income. [1] I restrict this analysis to URM students with SAT scores in the 900-990 and 1000-1090 range during the three years before Prop 209, which should be exactly the group and time period when mismatch is most likely to occur.

Figure 2 shows that for both of the low-scoring groups of URM students, graduation rates are higher at more selective institutions. Results for individual institutions vary somewhat, but the upward trend in Figure 2 is clear. I find a similar pattern of results in the period after Prop 209 was passed (not shown). The main limitation of this type of analysis is that it does not take into account unobserved factors such as student motivation that may be associated with admission decisions and student choice of institution. The Dale-Krueger method is meant to address this issue, but for the reasons explained above produces results that are not particularly informative.

A better solution is to find instances of students who attended institutions of differing selectivity for reasons unrelated to their likelihood of success. This is not possible with the UCOP data, but such quasi-experimental methods are used in two other studies that finds a positive relationship between selectivity and student outcomes. In a study published in 2009, Mark Hoekstra used a cutoff in the admissions process at a flagship state university to estimate the impact of attending that university on earnings. This strategy eliminates bias by comparing students who are very similar except that some were just above the cutoff for admission and others were just below. Hoekstra finds that attending the flagship increased earnings by 20 percent for white men.

In a more recent working paper , Sarah Cohodes and Joshua Goodman employed a cutoff-based approach to measure the effect of a Massachusetts scholarship that could only be used at in-state institutions. Students who won the scholarship were more likely to attend a lower quality college, which caused a 40 percent decrease in on-time graduation rates, as well as a decline in the chances of earning a degree at any point within six years.

These two studies do not directly address the mismatch question because they do not focus on the beneficiaries of affirmative action, but they show that taking into account students’ unobserved characteristics leaves intact the positive relationship between selectivity and student outcomes that has been consistently documented in the many prior studies that are less causally persuasive.

To truly put the mismatch theory to rest, rigorous quasi-experimental evidence that focuses on the beneficiaries of preferential admissions policies is needed. But the current weight of the evidence leans strongly against the mismatch hypothesis. Most importantly, not a single credible study has found evidence that students are harmed by attending a more selective college. There may well be reasons to abolish or reform affirmative action policies, but the possibility that they harm the intended beneficiaries should not be among them.

[1] Specifically, I estimate the coefficients on institutional dummy variables after including these control variables. For the controls I include dummy variables corresponding to the categories used in the UCOP data, as well as dummies identifying missing data on each variable so as not to lose any observations. The adjusted graduation rate for each institution is calculated as the difference in its coefficient estimate and Berkeley’s coefficient estimate plus Berkeley’s unadjusted graduation rate for the indicated group of students (i.e. Berkeley’s adjusted and unadjusted graduation rate are thus equal by construction).

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Using Oreos to study moon phases, grad student creates dynamic STEM lessons

• April 24, 2024

Fun, hands-on STEM lessons are a focus for Candide Krieger, who is earning her master’s degree from the College of Education Department of Curriculum Studies ( EDCS ) at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.

A part-time STEM / STEAM resource teacher at Jefferson Elementary School, Krieger is in the college’s Interdisciplinary Place-based and Sustainability Education (Watershed– Ahupuaʻa ) program .

She is creating Hawaiʻi -focused, Next Generation Science Standards ( NGSS ) Edukits—filled with lessons and supplies—for kids in Title I schools with support from a $1.7-million National Science Foundation ( NSF ) grant , for which EDCS Professor Pauline Chinn serves as principal investigator. Krieger is also conducting research on the effectiveness of the kits for teacher and student engagement and learning.

• Related UH News story: Teacher leadership program promotes integration of science with culture and place , June 26, 2017

“Candide’s students learn and retain so much when the lessons connect to their lives and interests, like using Oreos to study moon phases!” Chinn said. “She continues to seek funding opportunities through competitions and fundraising platforms in order to develop these hands-on lessons that students find engaging and fun-damental.”

Krieger also started a Lāʻau lapaʻau (medicinal Hawaiian garden) at Jefferson, and she volunteers there on the weekend. In one project, her students used branches trimmed from a wauke (paper mulberry) in the garden to create a rainforest. And, before going to the Symphony of the Hawaiian Birds performance, they crafted rainforest birds to hang from the branches.

Entrepreneurship grant

Krieger recently won a $1,000 Kalo Grant from the Pacific Asian Center for Entrepreneurship ( PACE ) for Edukits Hawaiʻi . This prize will cover a portion of her start-up costs, such as non-profit filing fees, website development, and other resources for the kits. She is also in the final round of PACE ’s Venture Competition , which includes a $10,000 cash prize.

“Sometimes I put my own money towards my classroom because I want my students to do more than just worksheets,” Krieger said. “It’s really important to me that they have fun hands-on activities like clay, kinetic sand, pipe cleaners and construction paper. We even learned how to make pickles last year!”

After graduating from Kaimukī High School, Krieger earned her BS in natural resource and environmental management as well as an AA in Hawaiian Studies, AS in communication arts, and a certificate of competence in entrepreneurship.

“Place-based education was something I was doing naturally in my teaching by combining my knowledge from my multiple degrees and from my experiences being born and raised here in Hawaiʻi ,” Krieger said. “I did not know place-based education was an actual method of teaching until I took a seminar with Dr . Chinn. Her class sparked my interest in pursuing an MEd . Everything that we did in class was relevant to me and helped boost my confidence with starting my non-profit.”

See more examples of Kriegerʻs classroom projects on her crowdfunding site .

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Sunday in the Park with George Opens at Booth Theatre

Keith Robinson (CFA’24) and Sarah Coleman (CFA’24) star as George and Dot in Stephen Sondheim’s Pulitzer Prize-winning musical Sunday in the Park with George. The College of Fine Arts School of Theatre production runs from April 25 to 28 at the Joan & Edgar Booth Theatre. Photo by Katie Nelson

CFA production of Stephen Sondheim’s Pulitzer-winning musical runs through Sunday

Emily wyrwa (com’26).

When College of Fine Arts students Sarah Coleman and Keith Robinson were assigned to sing the duet “Move On,” one of the lead numbers from the musical Sunday in the Park with George , in their musical theater class last year, Coleman (CFA’24) was thrilled. 

She has dreamed of playing Dot—the titular character’s love interest in the show—since her days as a teenage student at New Jersey’s Paper Mill Playhouse Summer Musical Theater Conservatory. 

“When I was 15, there was an arrangement of ‘Putting It Together’ [at the conservatory recital]. When I heard that song, I was like, where is this from? and I fell in love with the Sunday in the Park with George album,” Coleman recalls. 

This weekend, she will realize her dream when she and Robinson (CFA’24) star in the School of Theatre production of the renowned 1983 Stephen Sondheim/James Lapine musical. Directed by Clay Hopper (CFA’05), a CFA senior lecturer in directing, the show runs from April 25 to 28 at the Joan & Edgar Booth Theatre. The show is sold out, but names can be put on a waiting list at the door ahead of each performance. 

Inspired by the famous painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte by French pointillist painter Georges Seurat, the first act follows George—a fictionalized version of Seurat—and his mistress, Dot, one of his models for painting, as he creates his famous masterpiece. George considers how his ambition and obsession with creating art impacts his personal relationships, especially with Dot. The second act, set in 1984, introduces the audience to George and Dot’s great-grandson—also named George and also an artist—who is grappling with similar themes. 

“It is a breakdown of the entire artistic process and what it’s like to create art and then the impact that it generates on the world around us,” Robinson says. 

Sunday in the Park with George is one of Sondheim’s most beloved musicals. The original production won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1985, and the show has had three acclaimed Broadway revivals in the intervening decades. Hopper says that when he told people he was directing Sunday in the Park with George , he was suddenly given mountains of material to read. 

On the coffee table in his CFA office sits Lapine’s book Putting It Together, which chronicles his and Sondheim’s two-year journey creating the show. Hopper says he was constantly being asked how he would create “the tree, the dress, the three quarter thrust” stage structure. At a certain point, he had to stop reading, take a step back, and trust in the words and music.

“The play began to speak to me once I stopped listening to people talk about it,” Hopper says. “It began to say to me that the play is really making an argument for the reassertion of humanity as the center of art’s reason for being. When I realized that, it all just opened up and the design opened up and all the questions began to answer themselves.” 

Hopper and longtime collaborator, set designer Cristina Todesco (CFA’94), sat down to answer some of those questions with paper-and-pencil sketches of how they could use the Booth Theatre. 

“The play itself is very much about the conventions of design and how artists stretch and break through and reinvent and redefine all the things that they know about the art form,” Todesco says. “I think identifying what the conventions are is really important as an artist and even in this play, like the conventions of the seating arrangement, and how can we push that envelope? How can we stretch the parameters of those conventions?” 

It is also the first time in several years that the School of Theatre has produced a mainstage musical, something Hopper believes is an essential part of an actor’s education. And what better musical to introduce young actors to than Sondheim’s masterpiece? 

You can have your art, but also being a human is such an experience in itself that you don’t want to lose either. Sarah Coleman (CFA’24)

“One of the things that I said to the design team early on was that this material is so rich, and so limitless in its depth, that I think it is time for Sondheim to be installed into the canon in a real way,” Hopper says. “By that, I mean really reimagining his works. The same way that we do other great classics, like Shakespeare or Molière. It’s that good.” 

Coleman and Robinson acknowledge that performing the material is a challenge—Robinson is on stage for all but 15 minutes of the show, playing both the fictionalized Seurat and his grandson—but both say the show is a perfect capstone to their four years at CFA. 

“There’s one line that Dot says right near the end of the show: ‘Anything you do, let it come from you, then it will be new. Give us more to see,’” Robinson says. “That line, I think, is impactful to any actor or creator at any point in their lives and impactful to anyone in their career in their life at any point, but in particular as we’re approaching graduation, that’s the message I’ve taken from this whole process.” 

Hopper, too, says that the musical resonates on a deeply personal level. 

“There’s this moment that every artist has, no matter what discipline they’re in, where you see through what you thought was ‘the thing,’” Hopper says. “You break through your own obstacles. That is really what [art] is all about, and that’s what the play is ultimately about. It’s about seeing through and what it takes to do it and why it’s very difficult to do. 

“It’s for that reason that I find it so moving—it just seems to perfectly encapsulate every single thing that I’ve ever learned or am learning about being an artist.”

Sunday in the Park with George is at the Joan & Edgar Booth Theatre, 820 Commonwealth Ave., Thursday, April 25, and Friday, April 26, at 7:30 pm, Saturday, April 27, at 2 and 7:30 pm. and Sunday, April 28, at 2 pm. The performances are sold out, but names will be put on a waiting list at the door before each performance. 

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Research Assistant I - Public Health/Health Sciences (Student/Work Study)

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To be considered for this position, candidates must attach a cover letter as the first page of your resume. The cover letter should address your specific interest in the position and outline skills and experience that directly relates to the qualifications of this position.  A writing sample, such as a paper you wrote for a class, should be attached with the cover letter and resume.

The University of Michigan-Flint is seeking an undergraduate student as a Research Assistant I (Temporary).  This student will join the research team with a two professors, the undergraduate student and graduate students.  This study is sponsored by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) where you will conduct research to understand adolescents' perspectives on improving telehealth (remote care such as video and telephone healthcare visits).

This position is from May 2024 through April 31, 2025 for approximately 10 hours per week. 

Responsibilities*

Responsibilities include, but are not limited to:

• Conduct literature reviews to develop expertise in the area of telehealth
• Participate in mock interviews to prepare for the actual interviews
• Schedule, conduct (with another researcher),and take notes during video interviews
• Engage in writing summaries
• Serve as a co-author of presentations
• Be trained on, and assist in, analyzing qualitative and quantitative data
• Attend workshops on qualitative research
• Present research findings at local conference(s)
• Potential to present at a National conference
• Travel to/from pediatrician offices to invite them to participate, place flyers and recruit participants

Required Qualifications*

• Current undergraduate student in good standing with the University of Michigan-Flint 
• Strong verbal and written communication skills
• Interest in research, particularly pediatrics and telehealth
• Ability to travel to/from pediatrician offices with reliable transportation
• Available at least 10 hours per week

Desired Qualifications*

• Prior research experience 
• Familiarity with Qualtrics 
• Experience with quantitative data analysis software such as SPSS and Microsoft Excel
• Must have the ability to work independently on projects
• Demonstrate the ability to respect confidentiality

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