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From the end of World War II through approximately 1980, this country’s market-driven system of higher education has been praised for its accessibility, absence of central authority, broad-based political support, multiple sources of revenue, and demographic, institutional and structural diversity. More recently, perceptions of declining affordability, diminishing pools of traditional-age students, the ongoing replacement of tenured and tenure-line faculty by adjunct instructors, and an unrelenting privatization of public higher education have, among many other issues, raised concerns about higher education’s…

If, as is widely expected, the US Supreme Court issues a decision in 2023 that significantly limits, if not completely prohibits, the use of race in college and university admissions, it would come at exactly the wrong moment in the ongoing struggle to address our racial history. To further socioeconomic mobility and racial equity in the United States, selective colleges and universities must create more opportunities for high-achieving students from racially minoritized backgrounds, not fewer. But even if the Court…

The growing mismatch between the profiles of current full-time faculty, 75 percent of whom are white, and the nation’s increasingly diverse undergraduate student bodies, 45 percent of whom are people of color, represents a serious threat to socioeconomic and racial equity and intergenerational mobility. In spite of a generation of comprehensive targeted enrichment interventions from the undergraduate through postdoctoral fellowship stages, public and privately-funded efforts to increase the number of PhDs from historically underserved populations has been painstakingly slow.