Competition in Higher Education and Admissions Testing

The most important contemporary debate by far-and, in all likelihood, the most important of the past several decades-is the constitutional and

policy controversy over what we misleadingly have come to call “affirmative action”: the effort to achieve racial and ethnic diversity on our campuses by considering race and ethnicity as factors in the admissions process (e.g., AAU, 2002; American Council on Education [ACE], 1995; D’Souza, 1991; Hankins & David, 1996).