And the record in this case overwhelmingly shows that without the addition of race, student body diversity suffered, particularly among African-Americans.
Without clear guidance from the colleges, mixed-race students often turn to one another for advice, and their conversations spotlight how contentious the multiracial factor is in admissions.
In a closely watched decision in April, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the racial quotas enacted in 2004 by the University of Brasília, which reserved 20 percent of its spots for black and mixed-race students.
At the height of apartheid, it admitted few black or mixed-race students, and they were barred from campus dormitories, even forbidden to attend medical school postmortems on white corpses.
Mixed-race students who travel a lot while growing up can lack a cultural identity and also have to struggle with the fact that they don't have a history – or not one that's easily explained.
The university used every trick it could to avoid implementation of racist laws, so to the extent that it "admitted few black or mixed-race students" and maintained whites-only dormitories, it acted through gritted teeth, not from racism, as the article implies.
Douglas S. Massey, a Princeton sociology professor who was one of the researchers, said the black students from immigrant families and the mixed-race students represented a larger proportion of the black students than that in the black population in the United States generally.
The University of Phoenix, a pioneer in accelerated and compressed online degrees for midcareer adults, has been widely criticized for racing students through and for its low graduation rates.
At the end of the term, the researchers found that African-American students in the treatment group got significantly better grades than same-race students in the control group.
By 1860, it had numerous mixed-race students from the South, whose tuition was paid by their wealthy white planter fathers.
