Civil Rights and Federal Higher Education offers a renewed vision for higher education policy making, presenting an incisive analysis of the connections between educational politics and educational inequality. With a view toward the future, the editors assert that the thoughtful application of evidence-based solutions to complex policy problems can help establish a more just and equitable system of higher education.

Edited by Nicholas Hillman and Gary Orfield, the volume focuses on federal policy debates that have significant racial and socioeconomic implications, linking civil rights reforms to contemporary higher education policy issues. Through a mix of history and current events, the chapters highlight how policy has strayed from the Higher Education Act's intended trajectory of promoting and protecting civil rights. This drift, the editors show, has created far-reaching consequences for students of color, low-income students, and incarcerated students, in addition to the colleges that serve them.

Deftly identifying the social justice dimensions of today's federal policies, the editors reveal how certain political influences have preserved the interests of powerful and historically advantaged stakeholders--often at the expense of those who are less powerful and most disadvantaged. With great insight, the book's contributors explore higher education issues such as enrollment at Minority Serving Institutions, for-profit college outcomes, and legal and academic perspectives on affirmative action.

Perhaps more importantly, Civil Rights and Federal Higher Education provides guidance on what can be done to course correct. The book offers short- and long-term policy prescriptions and policy alternatives to help legislative staffers, policy analysts, and researchers plot a way forward.
About the Author:

Nicholas Hillman is a professor in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he also is a faculty affiliate with the Institute for Research on Poverty and the La Follette School of Public Affairs. His research focuses on postsecondary finance and financial aid policy, primarily as they relate to college access and equity. Hillman has testified to the US House of Representatives and the Wisconsin State Assembly on issues related to higher education accountability and finance. He teaches courses in politics of higher education, higher education finance, educational policy, and research methods. He also directs the Student Success Through Applied Research Lab, a research-practice partnership with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Division of Enrollment Management.

Gary Orfield is Distinguished Research Professor of Education, Law, Political Science and Urban Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he is also codirector of the Civil Rights Project he cofounded at Harvard University in 1996. He is a political scientist whose work includes more than a dozen authored or edited books, one of which was cited by the Supreme Court in upholding affirmative action. Orfield's work focuses on equal opportunity and civil rights and has been included in testimony in more than twenty major class action civil rights lawsuits on school segregation, housing discrimination, and other civil rights violations. He has taught at six universities, including Harvard University and the University of Chicago, and is a member of the National Academy of Education.