During the first months of my freshman year at Notre Dame, a representative of the admissions office visited my Contemporary Topics class, a few-week portion of the now-defunct Physical Education curriculum Notre Dame freshmen were, at the time, required to take. I don’t remember the admissions representative’s name, or his title. I don’t remember why he was there, or much of what he said. I do remember him discussing the topic of affirmative action, though I don’t think he used that phrase.
The representative spoke of how the admissions office sought to build what was, in their eyes, a well-rounded class, implicitly communicating that sometimes that meant accepting less-qualified students over more-qualified students. His most effective rhetorical moment came when he noted that if that year’s freshman class had been selected proportionally to where the applications came from, it would have an even higher share of students from the Chicago area than the already sizable portion we contributed at the time, which was somewhere in the neighborhood of ten percent. This “clicked” for me. It has since un-clicked.
Whether it’s constructing a diverse student body in terms of culture and life experience or advancing goals around national and global racial equality, the aims of affirmative action are, no doubt, well-intentioned. A great deal of collegiate learning takes place outside of the classroom. Racial equality is a noble goal. But affirmative action is at best a half-measure, a debatably effective treatment directed at symptoms rather than problems; and at worst actively racist itself, leading to alleged discrimination against an American racial minority—one that, like all American racial minorities, has been subject to its own cruel persecution over the years.
So, as Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard tentatively approaches the Supreme Court (whether it will reach it is unclear), and as California voters reject a proposition to legalize affirmative action within state government hiring, a few alternatives to the practice (many of which are already, in some form, being done) that might better address the core problems, and at the very least address the symptoms via a more effective, less discriminatory method:
Stop the ALDC Nonsense
At Harvard specifically, roughly 30% of each admitted undergraduate class is made up of ALDC applicants: Applicants who are either athletes (A), legacies (L), on the dean’s interest list (D), or children of faculty and staff (C). Legacies are applicants whose parents attended Harvard. The dean’s interest list consists of applicants whose admission is in the university’s “interests.” (Make of that what you will. Make of it that these kids’ parents are donating a lot of money.)
ALDC’s at Harvard specifically are disproportionally white, comprising roughly 43% of total white admits. Presumably, Harvard has no trouble raising money. Presumably, Harvard can recruit athletes who don’t require extraordinary treatment to be admitted. Presumably, Harvard can recruit faculty and staff without the carrot of admitting their children.
Would eliminating the ALDC interests solve the whole problem? No. But it’s an easy place to start, and if the goal is to not advantage white kids, eliminating a practice that unfairly advantages white kids checks out.
The ALDC issue isn’t limited to Harvard, but it’s fair to guess this isn’t as pernicious an issue at many other schools, where admitted classes are larger and the school isn’t such a target for aristocratic parents. In other words, this alone won’t solve the problem, but in places where the practice is used, eliminating it would help.
Evaluate Applicants in Context, then Prepare Them
It’s important to be careful with words when describing this phenomenon, but Black, Hispanic, and Native American youth are, on average, less prepared for a rigorous college environment than their white and Asian-American peers. This is a correlation in which race is not in any way the causation. It’s a product of racial correlations with socioeconomic status and educational opportunity. Again: This is not some white supremacist argument asserting that race is correlated with intellectual ability. That correlation does not exist. What does exist is, thanks to centuries of cultural trends including, but not limited to, explicit and implicit discrimination, a racial education gap in primary and secondary education. Take, for example, these mean SAT scores by race. The SAT is, clearly, an immensely flawed proxy for intellectual ability. I’d imagine it is, though, a fairly good proxy for how equipped a student is to handle the educational parts of college. And on average (this is important—this is on average), white and Asian-American students have been better-equipped by their local educational systems.
Evaluating each applicant, then, in the context of their school, community, family structure, etc. is essential, but so is preparing students once they’ve been found. It isn’t fair to students from poorer educational environments to drop them into elite institutions alongside rich kids who’ve been playing with loaded dice and expect the former to perform equally to the latter.
Yes, both of these things—context-based admissions and in-college assistance programs—are being done already. But they aren’t working, and the evidence for that is that we’re still talking about affirmative action. It might take more than special, in-college programs. It might take investments in students through opt-in, university-subsidized programs geared towards catching students up to what their peers have experienced before they’re even placed into 100-level courses. And if donors don’t want to subsidize such a program, all the more reason to stop blindly admitting their kids.
Invest in Primary and Secondary Education
Of course, catching students up is hard. This is part of what makes affirmative action so appealing to universities. They can look—and I mean visibly, since this is about race—like they’re “doing their part” by way of quotas or quotas-disguised-as-“personal-ratings.” What’s harder than catching students up is making it such that they don’t need to be caught up.
It would take a lot of money to do this, but the point of this is not things that are easy (with the exception of the ALDC measure at Harvard, which would be comparatively easy). But if primary and secondary education are at least one root of the problem affirmative action is pretending to try to solve, why not address that root? And who better to address issues of education than the premier educational powers of the world?
This is not to say that Harvard should take over our primary and secondary education system, or that it should take over any sort of systems anywhere, no matter how small. But more involvement in Boston is possible, just as it’s possible for Columbia to involve itself more heavily in New York, and for Penn to involve itself more heavily in Philadelphia, and Northwestern and the University of Chicago in Chicago, and Grinnell and Carleton in the rural Midwest, and Georgia Tech and Emory in Atlanta, and Vanderbilt in Tennessee and Kentucky, and Rice in Houston, and BYU in Salt Lake City, and the army of top Californian universities and colleges in California. Would measures like these alone solve the injustice? No. But investment is a start, and commitment to one’s community might do more for the world than engagement in an educational arms race, and the last time I checked, these schools all like to make a big deal about how much they’re helping the world.
Recruit Diversely
For schools like Notre Dame, inherently regional institutions trying to be national, challenges like the “Chicago problem” that admissions rep described to my class do exist. At the same time, my high school was visited two or three times while I was a student by a Notre Dame admissions rep. Those resources did not go towards addressing the Chicago problem. If you’re getting more applications from the Chicago area than you want, stop recruiting the Chicago area. Or recruit it strategically, in a way that encourages that “well-rounded” student body to which you aspire.
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Yes, these are vague. I’m no educational expert. I don’t purport to know the best way to make them work. This is a blog post, not an academic paper. But what is self-evident is that affirmative action is not accomplishing as much as we want it to, and while doing away with it without replacement would likely make the problem worse, it can be replaced with better alternatives, some of which are as simple as “stop giving rich kids preferential treatment.”
