A global view of affirmative action
The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last week to strike down race-consciousness admissions will leave American colleges looking for alternative means to ensure diversity in their student bodies.
But higher education in this country isn’t alone in seeking to enroll more students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Federal universities in Brazil must comply with racial and income-based quotas. Leading South African institutions like the University of Cape Town have instituted admissions policies that factor in race as well as other social indicators, such as students’ high school or their parents’ educational level, as part of an effort to undo the legacy of decades of apartheid. Under India’s “reservation” policy, a certain number of university seats are set aside for students from marginalized castes.
And then there’s France, where the Constitution prohibits any special treatment on the basis of “origin, race, or religion.” As a result, French universities can’t consider an applicant’s race in admissions decisions.
Back in 2016, my colleague Katherine Mangan looked at how one of France’s grandes écoles, or elite colleges, tried to find a workaround to diversify its student body. The Institute of Political Studies, or Sciences Po, sought to enroll more students from low-income high schools in Paris and its suburbs, giving them scholarships, extra tutoring, and professional mentors. Because those high schools are highly segregated, with many students immigrants or children of immigrants from North Africa, the school-based approach acted as a proxy for race.
While French universities are barred from collecting statistics based on race, Mangan found that about a quarter of Sciences Po’s students came from disadvantaged backgrounds under the policy.
Daniel Sabbagh, a senior researcher at Sciences Po’s Centre for International Studies and Research, calls the program an “indirect, race-conscious affirmative-action policy” — and with the Supreme Court ruling, more American colleges could take similar approaches.
In the wake of the decision, “the U.S. is moving closer to a French model, legally speaking,” said Sabbagh, who studies American and French affirmative-action programs. I spoke with him about France’s lack of consensus around the goal of racial diversity within higher education and why indirect affirmative action could be more successful in the United States than in his own country. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Let me start by asking about your reaction to the Supreme Court’s ruling.
What I think is striking in the decision is that they are not saying anything about indirect affirmative action, the extension of class-based affirmative action using sophisticated indicators for class that correlate with race intentionally. This is what matters in my view, because we’re going to see a move toward indirect affirmative action. And that move is not legally jeopardized right now.
Your own institution, Sciences Po, has one such indirect affirmative-action program. As American colleges try to figure out what’s next, are there things they can learn from that model?
Before you begin to think about my institution, I think that there are interesting elements within the U.S. like Texas’ percentage plan. In Texas, they really went far in disaggregating disadvantage to identify many indicators, with many of those correlating with race quite strongly.
What my own institution has done has been more successful in terms of diversifying the student body racially then class-wise, which is paradoxical because race is of course not factored into the admissions process. And whatever success there might be is also success by a single institution operating on its own, because Sciences Po is the only French institution which has done something of the kind. And it’s rich. It’s publicly supported, but it has leeway that a private institution might have. That success is not easily replicated, even within France.
More broadly, is French higher education a cautionary tale for what can happen when you cannot use race in admissions?
I think what is going on in the U.S. is that the U.S. is moving closer to a French model, legally speaking. That is, a model in which it’s not OK to use race transparently in an admissions formula. But basically that move has already been made in the U.S. at the local level, by Texas, by California, by Michigan, by about 10 states out of 50. By now, many U.S. universities are already used to dealing with that additional legal constraint.
I would say the main difference is probably that levels of residential segregation and levels of high-school segregation are higher in the U.S. than in France, meaning that indirect affirmative action using place as a proxy for race is probably more effective in Texas or even in California than it is in France, where high schools are less segregated. The other main difference is that in the States, it is actually possible to measure the effectiveness of indirect affirmative action because there are still statistical data broken down by race. We are completely unable to do this because we don’t have statistical data broken down by race. We’re simply guessing based on proportions of people whose parents were born abroad or whose parents were not French citizens originally. So we are using proxies all the way down, which makes our indirect affirmative-action regime probably less effective than what it is in Texas.
Are there other points of comparison?
It’s really hard to tell, because the French higher-education system is so different from the U.S. For example, French universities are basically free and nonselective. And whatever is not free and whatever is selective is a part of the system of grandes écoles. We have a much more institutionally bifurcated system between highly selective and utterly nonselective establishments.
In France, there are race-conscious policies, but they are not only indirect; they are indirect and implicit both at the same time. In the U.S., race-conscious policies are usually explicit. If you look at debates, nobody is denying that the goal is to find a way of promoting racial diversity in the student body. Nobody is actually feeling compelled to pretend that they’re doing otherwise.
In France, it’s completely different. There isn’t an official acknowledgment of the fact that racial diversity is being promoted and deliberately pursued. There isn’t even the beginning of a consensus about what the goal is supposed to be. Even though U.S. public opinion is strongly against affirmative action, there is a consensus in favor of it within the U.S. higher-education establishment, especially the most selective universities. If you were to poll presidents and faculty members at the top institutions, you would probably get a strong majority in favor of some kind of affirmative action.
It’s great to look at what other countries are doing, but I’m not sure that France is really such a useful source of inspiration. I would probably plead for more systematic domestic comparisons or maybe look at India and South Africa and countries that also have a large affirmative-action experience. It’s really a worldwide policy.
