Affirmative action was pretty far down the list of public excitements until the autumn of 1972, when the Secretary of Labor's Revised Order No. 4, fully implementing Executive Order 11246, landed on campus by way of directives from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. This executive order was assigned to the Secretary of Labor the job of specifying rules of implementation. The order imposed a one-size-fits-all system of “underutilization analyses,” goals, and timetables onto hospitals, banks, trucking companies, steel mills, printers, airlines, and on all the institutions that did business with the government. 

Affirmative action typically applies to either system of education or employment. The methods used to achieve these goals generally overlap.