Jeremy Pilaar: Class-Based Affirmative Action, Round 4

The Berkeley 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 fourth piece in the first of a series of continuing discussions of major issues. For the first piece, see Sam Barr’s post for the Harvard Political Review; for the second piece, see John Gee’s post for the Penn Political Review; for the third piece, see Mark Hay’s post for the Columbia Political Review.

As an immediately actionable method of increasing the number of low-income students in elite colleges, I like the basic concept of class-based affirmative action. Such a program would be fairly easy for college admissions offices to integrate if modeled after current affirmative action policies, and would likely expand the diversity of political and social views on our nation’s campuses. Furthermore, there is no evidence to suggest that the push could not coexist perfectly with continued race-based equality initiatives.

As a brief aside, I think we should be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to “regular old” affirmative action. While John Gee argues that “being poor necessarily interferes with substantive equality of opportunity, but belonging to a certain racial group does not”, the fact of the matter remains that African Americans continue to face a vastly more unequal social landscape than do whites and others in the U.S. As the Urban League’s 2009 State of Black America report carefully underlines, blacks remain twice as likely to be unemployed, and are three times as likely to live in poverty, both significant barriers to accessing equal education opportunities. Race-based affirmative action efforts attempt to remedy these ills by acknowledging that the playing field is not level and giving black students a leg up in arenas such as the college admissions process. Such policies are the best stopgap available until truly sweeping structural reforms can be implemented.

While I’m going to sound like broken record, Matt Yglesias is dead right to assert 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.” Sam Barr eloquently points out the limited impact of class-based affirmative action in selective colleges as a means of correcting for inequality:

Peter Beinart, echoing Ross Douthat, thinks that “More white working-class kids at Harvard would mean an American educational elite less easily caricatured by Fox News, and more able to speak across the red-blue divide.” While that might do wonders for the media discourse, it won’t do much to produce real educational and economic opportunity for the vast majority of Americans.

How, then, can we begin to tackle these overwhelming structural challenges? A quote from Harvard Professor Robert Coles, in an early Boston Globe piece on class-based affirmative action, provides some insight:

[Working class whites and blacks] are both competing for a very limited piece of pie, the limits of which are being set by the larger limits of class, which allow them damn little, if anything.

Part of the answer to finding the “complex and practical solution” Mark Hay so rightly pines for to remedy our deeper social inequities lies in expanding the size of that pie, not in continually shifting the conditions under which a segment of our ever-growing lower class competes for the same small morsel.

In other words, the question we as a society should be posing is not primarily ‘how can we increase economic diversity at Harvard’ (though this should still be a goal of the university), but rather ‘how do we increase the number of institutions of higher learning in the United States that offer a quality education rivaling that of Harvard’s at an affordable price?’

In my mind this can only arise in the form of a vast increase in our national and state-level investment in public education. In the face of recurring billion-dollar budget deficits, states like California have repeatedly slashed funding in the past several years for both K-12 and higher ed; the result has been fewer classes, higher tuition, and reduced access for the vast majority of those at the middle and bottom of the economic scale.

A renewed and highly structured commitment to building a world-class education system on both state and national levels – call it a Master Plan for the 21st Century – would be the surest way to guarantee equal access to a lifetime of affordable, quality education for all Americans. This is far from a pipe-dream; California achieved just such a system back in the 1960s and 1970s by successfully enacting its original Master Plan, which played a pivotal role in propelling the state to its current status as one of the ten largest economies on earth by further developing the state-operated UC, CSU, and Community College systems.

True equality of opportunity begins with access to a level playing field from the youngest possible age, meaning that American children must also benefit from a highly funded K-12 system subjected to rigorous standards of excellence applicable across state lines. This would hopefully include greater federal subsidization of state systems, as well as a reduced reliance on district-based funding for elementary and secondary schools, which currently perpetuates the cycle of poverty in lower-class communities.

The initiatives suggested above are of course vastly simplified, and would require significant investments in time and money in order to be properly developed and enacted; state and local governments would have to work closely with the federal government to agree on more stringent benchmarks for achievement in our public schools; both the federal and state governments would also have to work out a plan to guarantee sufficient, long-term funding for K-12 and higher education.

But while the details are complex, the basic idea behind such a project is simple and worth repeating: a system plagued by structural inequity demands reforms that tackle our current structure, not solutions that attempt to work within it. Americans must renew their commitment to universal access to public education.