Mark Hay: Class-Based Affirmative Action, Round 3

The Columbia Political Review has joined with other college political publications to form the Alliance of Collegiate Editors (ACE), hoping to generate cross-campus dialogue on political issues. This is the third piece in the first of a series of continuing discussions of major issues. For the first piece, see Sam Barr’s post at the Harvard Political Review; for the second piece, see John Gee’s post at the Penn Political Review.

Well, Messrs. Barr and Gee, it appears that we all stand in agreement on one point, and that point is Matt Yglesias, or at least his assertion that, “The presumption that you can solve any significant problem of social justice in America by fiddling with Ivy League admissions policies is dead wrong.” I can say very little that has not already been eloquently said by my peers to argue the case that class-based affirmative action, or any sort of affirmative action, stops far short of addressing the deep social inequities it seeks to tackle. I can and will, however, begin by attempting to paint a possible argument for this silver bullet solution, and promptly dispel the lore and the lure of that argument.

We may take an ideal situation in which the mangled and relative metrics used to identify those of high potential, but not high performance, manage to succeed. In this scenario, a deserving individual who has been disadvantaged by economic hardship is leveled out to represent in admissions his true merit, equal to that of a more advantaged student who has overcome less, been given more. Or we can take a less ideal argument and say that even if the relative metrics do not select candidates of comparatively equal merit, if affirmative action selects individuals of lesser merit, the economic advantage granted to them will, for a small social fee, all them to launch up the ladder of wealth and opportunity. In this more realistic scenario (more realistic in that, if existing admissions metrics are flawed, how should we expect mushier measures to provide any more exact results?), an “unworthy” graduate buys for their children and grandchildren progressively higher initial opportunities, gradually destroying roadblocks to success.

These are short-handed arguments—idealistic and basic. But they’ll serve for a quick musing. Even in one of these ideal situations, we run into the following problems: The disparity of wealth leads to self-segregation by class in college, denying students the opportunity to break down social barriers, denying the full benefit of the education to all parties, and brewing god knows what sort of future social ills. The need for lower-income students to focus their time on work study, second jobs, and so on, not to mention the psychological impact of debt and financial stress, deny these students equal time for study, extracurriculars, even access to the school-provided resources meant to help close these gaps. As an aside, I mention these problems because they have been on my mind—I have recently been interviewing for another project “cheating service providers.” In every case, I notice that these essay writers and homework “aides” claim that their clientele are not effete and privileged, lazy children, but the working class students who cannot dedicate as much time or mental energy to schoolwork as their wealthier peers. So it appears to me that affirmative action actually does nothing to ensure that those granted access to an education reap its benefits, and it may actually increase the likelihood of unethical behavior and the inevitable personal or academic and disciplinary consequences that come from such.

This is all hypothetical, but what I want to illustrate here is that, even if we were to give class-based affirmative action its ideal run at solving social inequities, it would fail. Now here is where I differ from Messrs. Barr and Gee—I think perhaps class-based affirmative action could serve a function in conjunction with numerous other attempts at mending social inequalities. I can envision a situation in which opening up such a fast-track could serve as a positive-feedback mechanism to encourage individuals, local governments, and politicians to attribute its forced success as the immediate success of a longer-term social project (the sort that democratic politics would usually reject for the need to show immediate change to win elections). If that seems a bit dishonest, well, such is political maneuvering, but I wanted to offer it up as one possible use of the policy.

Even this, though, would require that we make joint efforts at addressing problems of education reform, child-care reform, financial aid reform, and a number of more esoteric and unbelievably complex reforms. I will leave that alone for a moment, though. At the least, what we have found here is that we ought to consider affirmative action such a limited and limp answer, either in its race-based or class-based form, as to be a dead letter. Now I’d like to know this: why the hell are we talking about it? I believe our obsession with this conversation, with this topic, speaks to our nation’s love of the sound bite in politics, the need for simple, one-sentence policies to communicate to a mass and diverse electorate. Perhaps I’m wrong about that, but let’s pretend that I’m right for a moment. Sound bites have their place—they can even be politically beneficial, but only if they serve as a powerful impression of the essence of a larger plan, not a force that compresses plans into quick-fix, easy-to-understand, yet ineffective and limited solutions.

If my gut is right about this—if this affirmative action debate is all just a symptom of the encouragement in politics and media of simple-fix policy solutions and limited-view politics—then we do a disservice to continue that discussion, as we (speaking as budding intellectuals and media moguls simultaneously) encourage these ideas by showing that they can capture legitimacy and national dialogue. Everything I’m saying here is so abbreviated, and I’d be more than happy to launch into a deeper debate of all these musings and assertions with you in the comments. But for now, I’ll make one brash assessment: class-based affirmative action is, in this discourse, declared dead and worthless, and we waste valuable time, intellect and space picking at its corpse. And I’ll make one brash challenge: to the next voice in this discussion, either prove Barr, Gee and me wrong and show the unassailable merit of class-based affirmative action, answering all of our concerns, or use this space to help us to build a complex and practical solution to the deeper inequities we reference. And then let’s all try to figure out how to sell that snake oil to the picky public.