What Happens When Colleges Can’t Consider Race?
Six years ago, I visited the Paris Institute of Political Studies to learn how the elite institution, known as Sciences Po, was reaching into impoverished suburbs to pluck out deserving students who would enrich the school by diversifying its student body.
I spent a day with a 20-year-old Algerian immigrant, Ilyssa Yahmi, who was recruited in her senior year of high school. Because she attended a high school that was part of Sciences Po’s Equal Opportunity Program, she had access to weekly academic-support and college-prep workshops. After a personal interview by a Sciences Po admissions team, she was awarded a scholarship, offered tutoring, and later assigned a professional mentor to help her build a professional network and succeed in an academic setting so foreign to her.
Ilyssa went on to become a Fulbright Scholar and today is finishing a doctorate in political science at Temple University. She’s the kind of success story celebrated by proponents of “race neutral” college-diversity efforts.
I thought about her a few weeks ago while writing about how colleges on this side of the Atlantic are taking a much closer look at different ways to achieve diversity. Next month, the U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments in two cases, against Harvard College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, that many speculate could lead to sharper limits, and possibly a ban, on race-based affirmative action in college admissions.
Doubts about the future of affirmative action also were weighing heavily on the minds of admissions officials in the U.S. when I was reporting from Paris in early 2016. It was just months before the Supreme Court would narrowly and unexpectedly affirm the right to consider race as one factor among many in college admissions. Colleges were preparing to update their admissions playbooks, wondering if they could achieve meaningful diversity without factoring in race. Here are a few things I learned:
In France, class-based approaches are a necessity because the French Constitution prohibits special treatment on the basis of race. Lawmakers even voted in 2018 to remove the word “race” from the Constitution altogether, saying the term is outdated. To many, it evokes the horrors of the Nazi occupation, and it’s a word that’s practically taboo in France.
Here, where race is widely recognized as an important factor in diversity, colleges that are banned from using it often use proxies like socioeconomic status. The approach has its limits. Colleges can mine data and comb ZIP codes for neighborhoods with low family incomes, few college graduates, and lots of students eligible for free and reduced-price lunches. That can be time-consuming, expensive, and not always effective. But to some, it’s a more equitable way to bring the benefits of higher education to economically disadvantaged people of all races.
Targeting schools and communities for recruitment is easier in areas that are heavily segregated, like the banlieues, or suburbs, outside Paris where Ilyssa grew up and the communities in South Texas where the overwhelming majority of high-school students are Hispanic. Otherwise, it can be hit or miss. Favoring applicants from low-income neighborhoods that are gentrifying could unintentionally help wealthier people living in the cool new apartments on the fringes. Meanwhile, it wouldn’t help the financially struggling family that moves into the cheapest apartment in a well-off neighborhood in order to attend a top school.
Even in the high schools the Sciences Po program partners with, Ilyssa points out, not everyone is underprivileged. “Some students who had parents who were doctors or professors were able to benefit from this diversity program because of the high school they were enrolled in,” she said.
I heard more about such unintentional outcomes from Glenn Ellison, an economist at MIT who studied what happened when the Chicago Public Schools moved from race-based to race-neutral affirmative action in 2010. The city was divided into Census tracts indexed according to the level of disadvantage. The idea was that “By favoring kids from the low-income Census tracts, you’ll be helping diversify the school racially and helping admit more low-income students,” Ellison said. “It would be wonderful if it worked well.”
In fact, he said, the system ended up yielding fewer students from underrepresented minority groups and, surprisingly, fewer low-income students than a race-informed process produced.
Some colleges have experienced similar disappointments. In California, one of nine states with affirmative action bans, the University of California at Los Angeles has taken the kind of approach Sciences Po did by reaching into predominantly minority schools with its VIP Scholars program. Mentors and volunteers meet with students as early as ninth grade to start preparing them for college, offer special courses and generous scholarships. Despite extensive outreach and millions of dollars spent, the university has struggled, like the rest of the University of California system, to regain steep losses in minority enrollment it suffered when the ban took effect.
As a scholar in the United States, Ilyssa says she can appreciate the value that a consideration of race brings to the table, given the opportunities historically denied to so many people. As someone of North African ancestry who’s considered white by the U.S. government, but whose family has suffered discrimination, she also sees how difficult it can be to identify deserving students without a better understanding of their complex lives. —Katherine Mangan
