Chapter 7 examines the belief by some that affirmative action amounts to reverse racism and reverse sexism. The distinction between affirmative action and equal opportunity is described, as is the common belief that affirmative action involves quotas (quotas are illegal). Practices that undermine meritocracy in both college admissions and in employment are explored. These practices include legacy admissions, donors, and, in the context of employment, biases in job selection. Chapter 7 makes the case for the need of affirmative action because subtle forms of bias infiltrate all aspects of employment. The chapter critically examines the argument that diversity benefits organizations. The chapter ends with a discussion of goal-oriented versus process-oriented affirmative action plans, and other strategies to reduce bias in admissions and employment.

This chapter argues that the personal essay came into being at the beginning of the twentieth century, evolving from the familiar essay favored by writers such as Charles Lamb and Virginia Woolf. Prior to the twentieth century, the essay as a form was assumed to be personal but only in a deliberately circumlocutory manner. But the pressure to constitute a stable self brought to bear by academic and other institutions gave rise to a new conception of the personal essay, and to confession more generally, as a vehicle of “spectacular personhood.”

This chapter provides an overview of the admissions process, the admissions materials requested and how they are reviewed, and how success of the admissions process is measured. It also discusses the need for transparency during the admissions process. Examples from across a variety of world regions are presented to illustrate various admissions models.

This chapter shows that preferences do not differ greatly when we separate students out by their race/ethnicity, gender, or socioeconomic background. All groups favor applicants and faculty candidates from underrepresented minority racial/ethnic and socioeconomic groups. The one area where we see preference polarization is with respect to gender non-binary applicants and faculty candidates. Women tend to favor gender non-binary individuals but men disfavor them, consistent with intolerance among men toward gender non-conformity.

This chapter describes the preferences we estimate on attitudes toward undergraduate admissions and faculty recruitment across our full population of student particpants. It shows that students prioritize academic and professional achievement most, but also that they give preference to all underrepresented minority racial and ethnic groups over whites, to women and gender non-binary applicants over men, and to applicants from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds over the wealthy. They also give preference to recruited varsity athletes and to legacy applicants.

The concluding chapter provides a summary of the results reported in the previous chapters, emphasizing the overall preferences in favor of racial/ethnic, gender, and socioeconomic diversity and the broad consensus around these preferences across groups of participants. The chapter then reviews scholarship on how diversity affects campus communities and individual students and faculty, emphasizing that effects at the community level are widely regarded to be positive whereas deeper debates surround impact at the individual level. The chapter concludes by considering current challenges to affirmative action in college admissions in the courts and from those arguing for diversity of viewpoints rather than demographics.

This chapter shows that, even across our deepest political divides, we find little polarization of preferences on admissions and faculty recruitment. Breaking out participants by party, preferences differ, with Democrats favoring all underrepresented minority groups whereas Republicans are, statistically, indifferent toward non-whites and women (although they disfavor gender non-binary applicants). Most surprisingly, when we break out participants by whether they state support for, or opposition to, consideration of race in college admissions on a conventional survey question, both groups give preference to members of underrepresented minority racial/ethnic groups relative to whites, and to women relative to men, in our conjoint experiments. Preferences as revealed in holistic choices differ from those as revealed in standard surveys.

By the mid-1970s the sent-down youth movement was beset with insurmountable problems. As Chapter Six demonstrates, an increasing number of urban youth did not want to stay in the countryside, while urban cadres became equally unwilling to join the weiwentuan teams dispatched to provide relief. Relations between rural governments and the weiwentuan from Shanghai became conflictual, paralleled by mutual antagonism between urban youth and rural leaders. At the same time, weiwentuan reports on conditions of sent-down youth became desperately pessimistic about the prospects of long-term settlement of urban youth in the countryside. The flow of youth back to Shanghai increased, primarily without official sanction. What stand out in archival reports are the ways in which the Shanghai government, weiwentuan, and rural officials, all charged to support the sent-down youth movement, began a collaboration to enable youth to return to the city and re-establish their official urban residency. By the time dramatic protests by youth on the Yunnan state farms took place in 1978–1979—commonly cited as bringing the movement to a halt—almost all the Shanghai youth assigned to production brigades had already left or were in the process of leaving.