Research Archive

July 7, 2023

With Affirmative Action Gone, We Should Focus Admissions Policies on Poverty

If history is any guide, Supreme Court ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard won’t mark the end of the struggle over the constitutionality of race-conscious policies. It won’t even mark the beginning of the end. Most likely, it will just be another in a long series of inflection points. To borrow from one of the…

By Brent Orrell

July 6, 2023

The End of Affirmative Action Calls for a Renewed Conservatism of Opportunity

Only about 40 percent of adults in their late 20s have a bachelor’s degree, and that’s true of only 25 to 30 percent of blacks and Latinos in that age range. Just 20 to 25 percent of black and Latino men ages 25 to 29 have a bachelor’s degree. Most college graduates attend schools that are minimally selective. All…

By Scott Winship

July 3, 2023

Child Welfare’s Ideological Enforcer

University of Houston professor Alan Dettlaff is the founder of upEND, a movement dedicated to abolishing child protective services and foster care because of their alleged systemic racism. Dettlaff is active on social media, where he spends his time attacking rigorous academic research, encouraging social media mobs to insult others in the field, and even demanding…

By Naomi Schaefer Riley

July 3, 2023

Understanding Nontraditional Work Arrangements and the Policy Landscape for Self-Employed Workers and the Gig Economy

By Liya Palagashvili

July 2, 2023

New York’s Quality of Life Budget: Focus on Improving Conditions for Everyday People First

With no little fanfare, the City Council passed legislation requiring New Yorkers to separate their food waste for composting. Unmentioned amidst the claims for environmental progress was the fact that, even in a less aggressive plan included in Mayor Adams’ budget, the city would have to add 158 collection trucks to its sanitation fleet, at a…

By Howard Husock

June 30, 2023

Democrats Call Biden’s Economy “Savage” in Attempt to Revive Child Tax Credit

With unemployment near record lows and President Joe Biden running for reelection, some Democrats recently offered an unexpected take on the U.S. economy: It stinks, especially for low-income families. During a recent Senate Finance Committee hearing, Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) thundered that parents are currently “scraping by … in this savage economy,” burdened with “some of the lowest…

By Matt Weidinger

June 30, 2023

House Republican Plan Penalizes Marriage

We just got more bad news about marriage. A record-high 25% of 40-year-olds in the United States were never married in 2021, according to sobering new statistics from the Pew Research Center. That statistic compares to just 6% of never-married 40-year-olds in 1980, underscoring marriage’s falling fortunes in recent decades. Digging further into the Pew data reveals that this retreat from…

By W. Bradford Wilcox

June 30, 2023

The U.S. Could Learn a Lot from This School in the U.K.

Last month, I took advantage of a trip to the U.K. to spend a day observing at London’s legendary Michaela School, which serves about 800 students ages eleven to 18, a short distance from Wembley Stadium. Katharine Birbalsingh, who has gained fame in her country (some say infamy) as “Britain’s strictest headmistress,” invited me for an entire day…

By Robert Pondiscio

June 30, 2023

It’s Time to End Legacy Admissions

The Supreme Court’s decision in the UNC and Harvard cases was received, as most news is these days, in two quite different ways on the two sides of our political aisle. But one theme seemed to resonate with both supporters and opponents of affirmative action: that in the spirit of ending unfair admissions practices, elite…

By Yuval Levin

June 29, 2023

Investing in Ideas, Influencing Policy: A Guide to Think Tank Effectiveness

Executive SummaryAs donors evaluate think tank investments, this paper proposes a series of features that distinguish independent autonomous public policy think tanks and their effectiveness in influencing public policy choices. With careful consideration to the process outlined in thisreport, donors may direct think tank funding toward those with high impact. It will discuss and exemplify…

By Howard Husock