Every year, thousands of college applicants are accepted, not solely because of, but with the additional help of affirmative action policies in American colleges and universities. The subject is a hotly debated one: on one hand, the intended purpose is to increase racial equality and provide opportunities for supposedly underrepresented minorities and genders in different areas of society (i.e., education, employment) – on the other hand, opponents claim it embraces reverse discrimination and has not been proven to significantly improve the socioeconomic status of minority groups.
I fall into the ‘opponents’ category, and instead, advocate a different type of affirmative action: one based on class rather than race (or gender). This stance has been gaining momentum, and has recently been reaffirmed in Tel Aviv sociologist Sigal Alon’s paper in American Sociological Review, as covered on insidehighered.com. Her extensive study shows that, despite growing numbers of college graduates, the class divide has actually grown. This observation lies in contrast with sociological theory, which proposes that higher numbers of college grads will in turn bring up the less advantaged in society. So why the discrepancy between theory and reality?
The key factors, she writes, are that demand for higher education outpaced supply (even with all of that growth in available slots), that testing became a more important factor in admissions at more institutions, and that wealthier families are much speedier to adapt to changes in admissions rules.
As the number of applicants to higher education grew, high school students of higher socioeconomic status were more apt to receive extra support from tutors, extra teaching, study guides / books, and better high schools. Alon characterizes this property as a result of the sociological theory of ‘adaptation.’
Parents of all economic classes want their children to succeed, but the wealthier ones “better understand the postsecondary landscape and competitive admission process and they invest in resources to promote college attendance,” she writes. As a result test score gaps of high school seniors — grouped by economic background — have grown during recent years.
Even though colleges have tried to adjust to this through such methods as SAT-optional applications, the result will be unchanging; higher classes’ ability to ‘adapt’ will be the case no matter what new strategies for applications are imposed by colleges. So what is the purpose of race-based affirmative action? Why are underrepresented minorities given an advantage over others – moreover, why are they in fact underrepresented? Advocates of this type of affirmative action point to two reasons: 1) to revert minority disadvantages as a result of institutionalized or incidental discrimination, or 2) because certain minorities have been shown statistically to have a greater likelihood of lower socioeconomic status, so exposure to higher education will gradually undo this situation.
There are two problems here. Although racism unfortunately still remains in regions of our country, the fact is that ‘institutionalized’ racism is close to being practically nonexistent. Furthermore, many of the minorities attending colleges and universities are just as well-off and of equal social status as their Caucasian peers. I have no statistical backing to this statement, but I would say that at Cornell, I know many students of ‘diverse’ ethnicity that come from much more wealthy and advantaged families than my own. So what is the goal of current policies – to help advance minority communities or to bring up those who do not have the same advantages as others? I would hope that everyone would agree that our goal should be to assist the people who are disadvantaged.
Schools can do this through a new breed of affirmative action, a “class-based affirmative action, in which current and future adaptation by wealthy families is balanced by an admissions edge given to those without the means to match those advantages.” In a class-based affirmative action process, every ethnicity will be represented proportionally in each respective socioeconomic pool, and if certain ethnicities are in fact more common in ‘disadvantaged’ echelons of society, then we are simultaneously accomplishing the goal of aiding those targeted minority groups.
