Abstract
The political prospects of affirmative action do not look good. Yes, the U.S. Supreme Court has stood by race-conscious college admissions policies for four decades, but those decisions have whittled away the acceptable rationales and methods. The most recent decisions rest on one-vote margins. Activist opponents are ready in the wings, as they pursue new cases against Harvard University, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, and elsewhere. Eights states ban affirmative action in public colleges and universities altogether. Yet the policy still has ardent supporters who have run many of the country’s most powerful institutions: elite higher education, the Fortune 500, the U.S. military.
Sigal Alon’s comparative study of race and class-based admissions in the United States and Israel is highly relevant for these debates. Race, Class, and Affirmative Action provides compelling evidence for those who want to assess admissions policies based on how these policies influence the representation of racial minority and economically disadvantaged students on elite campuses. The book presents concise empirical answers to pragmatic questions: What are the outcomes of a race-sensitive admissions policy? What happens without it? What can class-based affirmative action achieve? Alon’s launching point is the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Fisher v. University of Texas, which permits colleges and universities to voluntarily consider applicants’ racial status so long as “race-neutral” options are inadequate for achieving an institutional goal of diversity. Let’s take that instruction seriously, Alon says.
The result is a novel and exciting addition to the extensive body of social scientific research on race and college admissions. Existing research has generated instructive findings: a racially mixed student body generates educational and civic benefits, race-conscious admissions policies are an effective means of increasing the representation of students of color on campus, and policies that deliberately do not consider race have been ineffective at increasing minority representation in many top institutions. But, to date, we have not understood how class and racial considerations compare in elite admissions or the implications of swapping out racial considerations for class-based ones.
This book reveals powerful core findings: across both countries, affirmative action provides valuable mobility for students of color and economically disadvantaged students. It enables them to access the most selective colleges and universities, where they excel, with better results than if they had attended less selective schools. Further, there is no feasible model of affirmative action that explicitly ignores applicants’ racial status and still achieves contemporary levels of African American and Latino enrollment in the top U.S. colleges and universities, where race-conscious admissions is still very common.
The book’s artful research design is a U.S.-centric analysis that successfully uses Israel as a comparison case. Focusing on the most prestigious colleges and universities in each country, it compares the outcomes of the United States’s race-conscious model of affirmative action to those of Israel’s class-based affirmative action. It also compares simulated policies to understand the consequences if the U.S. schools used only class-based affirmative action and if Israeli schools used only a race-based model.
The selection of Israel for comparison is clever. The admissions policy of Israel’s top four universities is the only one in the world that explicitly considers class but not race. The unique data set comprises institutional administrative data on cohorts from 1999 to 2008 at these four schools, including student application information, student transcripts, admissions decisions, and, notably, direct indication by the university of whether it used affirmative action to make the admissions decision. The data for the United States are based on longitudinal studies of the 1995–1996 cohort of students at highly selective colleges and universities, derived from students’ FAFSA forms. They include students’ scores on standardized entrance tests, high school grade point average, and other measures of academic achievement. As is conventional in this line of scholarship, Alon designates African American and Latino students as “race-based admits” in this sample if their test scores are in the bottom 25th percentile of test scores among non-athlete white and Asian students.
Time and again, Alon advises readers to ask: what kind of diversity do we want? Different sorts require different kinds of policies. Her examination of Israel’s class-based policy makes evident that there are a few very different ways to do class-based affirmative action. The calculation can favor individual-level attributes (family income alone or combined with parental education), structural attributes (the applicant’s neighborhood and high school, which is the premise of Israel’s policy), or some combination thereof, each with different consequences.
Alon frames the findings in terms of the pros and cons of different policies according to their feasibility and their effects on the demographics of the student body, student academic performance, and student upward mobility. The chapters on the results make evident the advantages and pitfalls of the affirmative action model that each country has adopted as well as the relative merits of alternative approaches. In Israel, for example, a class-based policy effectively expands access and improves mobility for academically borderline, economically disadvantaged students. Although a race-based model and non-structural class-based models would create a higher proportion of a particular marginalized group at these Israeli universities, the current policy has the advantage of creating a student body with the greatest variation along many axes.
Among the book’s many insights is that, in the United States, the only race-neutral option that could maintain current enrollment levels of African American and Latino students at the most elite colleges and universities is a radical one. These schools would have to eliminate their (substantial) preferences for athletes and children of alumni and donors in the bottom 25% of an entering class and replace those with preferences for economically disadvantaged applicants. Indeed, this is the only version of affirmative action that would maintain the enrollment of African Americans and Latinos at close-to current levels. It actually would boost enrollment of economically disadvantaged students and those from underrepresented geographic regions. However, implementing such a policy would be very expensive.
One conspicuous lacuna of the book is the lack of discussion of why race-conscious affirmative action is on the ropes in the United States. While the book notes the substance of opponents’ arguments, it makes no reference to the white racist backlash against interventions to create opportunity for people of color, particularly African Americans. The missed opportunity is most evident in Chapter Three, which explains why affirmative action became so controversial by detailing the social, economic, and academic factors that have made an elite degree all the more coveted yet perilously out of reach for most. In general, the discussion of racial inequality in the U.S. context is fairly buried. It appears that, in an effort to be non-controversial, some key information has been left out of the story. Without it, though, it is not clear why race-based interventions continually require rigorous defense or why class-based models have gained some traction.
Alon impressively succeeds at the main objective she sets forth: explaining the demographic outcomes of different admissions policy designs, aided by the creative use of simulations. Policy makers and analysts, administrators, and sociologists of higher education, race, racism, and inequality should all take note. The book explains technicalities in accessible language, and it clearly highlights the main findings. There is no politically neutral way of determining the right admissions policies because admissions objectives are themselves political. By foregrounding questions about what kind of diversity we want and whom education is for, and by working in the tradition of the best policy-relevant social science, Alon showcases the consequences of selecting different means and aiming for different ends.