What an Elite French Institute Can Teach American Colleges About Diversity

Ilyssa Yahmi’s daily commute from her home in Garges-lès-Gonesse to the Institute of Political Studies is just over 10 miles, but the two places seem worlds apart.

The 20-year-old Algerian immigrant is attending the prestigious public university commonly known as Sciences Po under an admissions plan that draws heavily from the impoverished immigrant suburbs, or banlieues, on the outskirts of Paris.

Students admitted under the Equal Opportunity and Diversity Program, which began in 2001, now make up 10 percent of each entering class. Coupled with those admitted via the regular track, the portion of the total student body that comes from disadvantaged backgrounds has climbed from 6 percent to about 27 percent since the program began. That’s more than double the share at France’s other grandes écoles, or elite colleges.

Some affirmative-action experts say American colleges that struggle to enroll low-income, minority students can learn from the Sciences Po model. Its focus on socioeconomic factors, they argue, offers a better way to diversify campuses than race-conscious admissions programs do.

French and American higher education and laws are quite different, of course, and no one suggests that France’s “positive discrimination,” as it’s called, could be adopted wholesale. What’s more, the Sciences Po model has faced occasional resistance within France, including legal challenges.

Yet the program has helped students like Ms. Yahmi become bridges between two cultures.

“Everyone thinks of the banlieues as these terrible, dangerous places, but they’re not,” she says. “We’re different, but we’re French, too.”

Race and Class

In the late 1990s, the Sciences Po director at the time, Richard Descoings, realized that nearly 80 percent of its students came from about 20 predominantly white, middle-or-upper-class high schools. He came up with an admissions track for students in seven of the region’s poorest high schools.

Applicants, who receive special courses and counseling starting in their sophomore year, skip the rigorous entrance exam and instead write an essay that they defend before a jury of teachers and administrators from their high schools. The top students are invited for an interview at Sciences Po by a panel that includes a faculty member, a staff member, and a representative of one of 20 large companies that sponsor scholarships.

The accepted students receive generous financial aid and optional tutoring, usually from graduates of the program, to help them adjust to the fast pace of their studies. They’re also offered mentors, many of them prominent business executives. The program has grown to 106 feeder schools, from which about 1,000 students apply each year. About 150, or 15 percent of the total applying to Sciences Po, are accepted.

One difference between affirmative-action practices in the United States and France is the extent to which each can consider an applicant’s race. The first article of the French Constitution specifically bars differential treatment on the basis of “origin, race, or religion.”

As a result, “we cannot even talk in terms of race,” says Laura Lanzone Dubois, senior access officer for Sciences Po’s diversity program. “It’s like the word has been wiped from our language.”

The wording in the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which guarantees everyone “equal protection of the laws,” isn’t quite as clear-cut. That’s one reason that race-sensitive affirmative-action policies are being debated by the U.S. Supreme Court and have so far been allowed to exist, if narrowly tailored, to achieve diversity.

That could change, depending on how the Supreme Court rules in the challenge it’s currently considering to race-conscious admissions at the University of Texas at Austin. If the court should require stricter limits on when, or even if, race can be considered, it will put greater pressure on American colleges to expand race-neutral approaches.

Advocates for admissions programs that offer a preference for high-achieving, low-income students believe the changes in Sciences Po’s student body over the past 15 years show that racial diversity can be achieved by indirect approaches.

It is difficult to determine the racial breakdown of Sciences Po’s students, because France largely bars the collection of statistics based on race. But there is little question that there are far more low-income students, many of them from black, North African immigrant families, since the diversity program began.

“In many ways, what they’re doing at Sciences Po is more progressive than policies here,” says Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, who is an advocate of so-called class-based affirmative action in the United States. He wrote about a Sciences Po study in 2011 that found that students admitted through the diversity program “keep up or quickly catch up with their peers” and have “marginal” dropout rates.

“They’re reaching these diamonds in the rough — students who have faced significant obstacles and who are doing very well,” Mr. Kahlenberg says.

Relatively few American universities give preference to students on the basis of low socioeconomic class, he adds, because that’s expensive. “If you admit well-off students of color, you don’t need to provide as much financial aid,” he says. Racial diversity is also more obvious and easier to demonstrate than socioeconomic diversity, he says.

Sigal Alon, an associate professor of sociology and anthropology at Tel Aviv University, compares race-conscious American policies with other models, including Sciences Po’s, in her book, Race, Class, and Affirmative Action. She concludes that the French approach might not translate well to some American universities.

Reading additional essays and conducting personal interviews would be too time-consuming for most large universities, she says. She also questions whether Sciences Po’s policy is truly race-neutral and if it would pass muster in the United States if the Supreme Court further limited consideration of race in admissions. “Skin color is quite evident in an interview,” she wrote in an email.

‘The Toughest Students’

Indeed, while Sciences Po’s program purports to be race-neutral, some say that giving special treatment to students in highly segregated schools is a backdoor way of recruiting more minority students. Three-quarters of the residents of many of the targeted neighborhoods are second-generation immigrants from North Africa, according to Daniel Sabbagh, a senior researcher at Sciences Po’s Centre for International Studies and Research, who has studied American and French affirmative-action programs for two decades. He calls Sciences Po’s method an “indirect, race-conscious affirmative-action policy” that relies on “a great deal of segregation in a relatively small number of high schools.”

It’s similar, he says, to a Texas program that guarantees acceptance to the state’s flagship universities to the top 10 percent of students in each high school in the state, a plan that draws large numbers of minority students from schools on the border with Mexico.

As a faculty member, Mr. Sabbagh says he has no idea which of his students enter on the Equal Opportunities track and hasn’t seen any drop in the quality of his students since the plan took effect.

Hâkim Hallouch, now director of the Equal Opportunity and Diversity Program, was in the first class of students accepted to it. He says that only about 3 percent drop out after the first year, and practically none after that.

“We try to identify the toughest students who will be psychologically able to mix with various cultures,” says Ms. Dubois, the access officer. The program also looks for those with intellectual curiosity who can articulate a compelling case for what they can offer Sciences Po.

“Some of those young people have never seen people around them work,” she says. “They’re just surviving. They’ve had no model of success.”

Ms. Yahmi’s father had a solid job in public relations back in Algeria, but in France he has been able to land only odd jobs. The family lives in a 10-story housing complex where she shares a bedroom with a younger sister. During a visit with a reporter to her former high school, Ms. Yahmi blends into the crowd of students in a black leather jacket, jeans, and sneakers, her hair pulled back in a ponytail.

An accounting teacher who helped Ms. Yahmi with the application process, Renia Moussaoui, says students whose parents are unemployed and struggling need a confidence boost: “Many of the students have no ambition. They say they haven’t been anywhere and they can’t imagine what they’d have to offer.”

Ms. Yahmi says her tutor and mentor at Sciences Po, along with the support she got from high-school teachers like Ms. Moussaoui, helped her overcome any such doubts. Looking around her high school, with its stark hallways and barred windows, she smiles. “I made it to Sciences Po from here.”

Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.