The authors introduce a college admissions simulation activity that facilitates discussions of affirmative action and racial disparities in the seemingly objective college admissions process. In this activity, students serve as mock admissions committees in small groups. On the basis of activity sheets collected from multiple courses across several institutions, the authors disclose quantitative patterns in students' applicant choices and qualitative themes reflecting students' decision making processes. The authors discuss how this activity and subsequent class discussion help students to recognize and think through meritocratic assumptions and color-blind practices that reproduce racial inequality.

Because U.S. states are meaningful polities with differing cultures and institutions, they are important locations for the struggles for resources. Yet there have been surprisingly few studies of how state-level cleavages and institutions shape the pattern of income inequality, especially by race. This article matches individual-level data on income and its determinants (from the Current Population Survey) to state-level measures (mostly from Census data) of varying demographic, power, and institutional configurations. A multilevel model of the racial pay gap is estimated showing that racial income inequality increases with the size of the minority population in the state but decreases with the rate of filing racial discrimination complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The index of labor market power (a scaled index of union density and the size of the public sector) increases pay across the board but does not reduce racial income inequality. The findings suggest that recent and current neoliberal efforts across states to shrink government, limit unions, and abandon enforcement of antidiscrimination will lower wages for all workers and exacerbate racial income inequality.

The study addresses how Kurds who currently live in the United States think about and manage their children’s education. Of particular interest is the ways in which the gender of their children influences how parents engage with their children’s education. Based on interviews with Kurdish parents who live in Nashville, Tennessee, the study reveals that, in general, they feel more responsible for and take a much more proactive role in their children’s education than is typical of Kurds living in Kurdistan. This is so because the parents are not only concerned with securing an education for their children but also making sure their children adopt a Kurdish identity. The study also found that gender plays an important role in parental investment, albeit not in a straightforward way. That is, even though parents support the education of both their sons and daughters, they are nonetheless guided by deep seated assumptions that, once they grow up, their sons and daughters will live very different lives. More specifically, the parents operated on a taken-for-granted assumption that their daughters would live more circumscribed lives than their sons and hence needed a somewhat different educational investment during childhood.

Do black and white students hold similar beliefs about the causes of life opportunities? Disparities in academic performance between blacks and whites have been attributed, in part, to differing attitudes about the relationship between education and life opportunities. Advocates of oppositional culture theory argue that black students consider structural barriers to have more influence on prosperity than do their own efforts in the classroom; detractors contend that black and white students equally consider individual academic performance to be key to future life opportunities. Using the National Education Longitudinal Study, 1988 through 1992, the author demonstrates that students simultaneously accept both structural and individualistic explanations for prosperity. Black students report greater support for structural explanations than do white students, but they report equal or greater support for the relevance of education to their futures. The author finds that, while black and white students do differ in their optimism about future opportunities, dissimilar attitudes about social structure, rather than education, are accountable for this.