HPRgument Blog — December 12, 2010 2:34 am

Weighing In: Is Affirmative Action a Poverty Relief Program?

By Max Novendstern

In their exchanges, both Pete and Sam seem to accept the rather odd idea that affirmative action exists primarily to benefit the poor. For example, Sam writes that:

Peter’s most compelling argument is that affirmative action “typically benefits only middle- and upper-class minority students”—that is, students who probably aren’t nearly as vulnerable to segregation, foreclosure, unemployment, educational inequality, and other social disadvantages. If that’s true, I am completely open to revising my view on race-based affirmative action, so long as it is replaced by class-based affirmative action.

Yet in a world where less than 30% of Americans go to college, and only a fractional percentage of those students end up at elite universities where selection criteria even matters, affirmative action will always be a relatively “middle- and upper-class” problem. Whether a minority student gets helped into Harvard (or has to settle for Tufts or NYU instead) has almost no impact on the structure of inequality in America.

Which is not to say that affirmative action isn’t important, only that its importance as policy lies elsewhere.

In my view, the case for race-based affirmative action rests on the case for racial diversity as an institutional good — a good on par with, say, having football players in the classroom, or foreign exchange math students and prep school grads eating lunch together. Harvard is a big place with huge number of needs; we “need” to fill up football stadiums, and build out our math department, and keep our feeder schools happy. We admit students in what is ultimately an opaque and non-standardizable process for one reason alone: to fulfill those perceived institutional needs. That’s our prerogative as a university; we build each class from the top going down.

It seems incredibly reasonable, then, that one admission factor — among many — should be racial diversity. For all sorts of reasons, Harvard wants to help minorities get through the gates: to hedge into the best talent pools; to create a dynamic campus culture; to extend the reach of the Harvard brand.

From the university-eye view, then, it’s educational diversity, not social justice, that makes up the case for race-based affirmative action. And there’s law behind this. In the landmark affirmative action case, Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the Court said that affirmative action could not be justified on the grounds of reparations or poverty relief; it could be justified, however, as a feature of universities’ ongoing commitment to intellectual diversity. “The atmosphere of ‘speculation, experiment and creation’ — so essential to the quality of higher education — is widely believed to be promoted by a diverse student body,” Justice Powell wrote.

Thus the social benefits of affirmative action are either very local (for the families involved) or very elite (for the institutions that benefit). At its best, race-based affirmative action helps universities like our own — and organizations all around the country — maintain their competitive edge.

And that’s a good thing.

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Author: Max Novendstern is the former Editor-in-Chief of the Harvard Political Review.
  • Bro

    Yes, having football players in the classroom is key. The other day I was trying to understand something about Hegel when a football player handed me a Four Loko. After that, everything made sense.

  • Sam Barr

    The comment above is great.

    (And yet I still think Max has a point.)

    I didn’t say that race-based affirmative action exists primarily to benefit the poor, only that it would be more justifiable if it did. Because then it could be defended as a bulwark against discrimination and inequality, rather than merely a means to increasing racial diversity in the classroom. (Frankly, if we’re just talking about what color skin the rich kids are going to have, I’m not sure that racial diversity is as valuable as it would be otherwise.)

    And yes, Max, your point that not everyone goes to college is well-taken. It’s a point I found pretty compelling this summer (http://hpronline.org/hprgument/ace-forum-class-based-affirmative-action), but now I’m not so sure. First of all, not all colleges are Harvard or Tufts or NYU, and ideally we would expand access to non-liberal arts colleges for students for whom such an education really would be superfluous. By your logic, isn’t a diverse class still valuable at a two-year community college?

    Moreover, affirmative action isn’t used just in college admissions, but also in employment. And the diversity rationale applies just as well there. Now, maybe diversity of perspective seems more necessary in a law firm than it does in a construction firm, so maybe affirmative action still would disproportionately benefit middle- and upper-class minorities. But an argument could be made for diversity in a lot of blue-collar, working-class employment settings. For instance, in the New Haven firefighter case from last year, the city argued that it needed affirmative action in order to ensure that the fire department represented the city—so that this essential public service earned the trust of the people.

    So, anyway, my point is that race-based affirmative action could be more helpful to working-class people than either you or Peter give it credit for. At least it could be tweaked to become more helpful to them. There’s no logical necessity that makes it a boon to the upper-class.

  • Peter Bozzo

    Max, your points are extremely well-taken and are really useful for contextualizing debates like this, which often overlook the small fraction of students actually affected by affirmative action policies. But I think your distinction between justifications for affirmative action based on “educational diversity” and “social justice” – a distinction that always comes up in discussions about affirmative action – is a bit artificial. I think all three of us value classroom diversity, which is why we’re taking up the issue of affirmative action at all, and I think we all agree that current levels of social inequality prevent our colleges from achieving an adequate level of classroom diversity. Presumably, if all citizens had equal educational opportunities regardless of their race – if social justice were attained – then all races would be admitted to college in proportion to their presence in the population at large, and diversity would be achieved. Therefore, diversity follows from social justice, and it’s in some sense inseparable from it.

    Where we differ, then, involves our approach to correcting for this social inequality. For Max, affirmative action won’t do much; it can’t overcome dismal college attendance and graduation rates (especially among our poorest students), so we have to make the best of what we have and aim at achieving classroom diversity. But in my view (and I think, based on Sam’s comment above, that he would agree), affirmative action can do much more than this – it can actually work to equalize educational opportunities, which means it can move us toward social justice and therefore toward classroom diversity. In my view, the way to respond to low levels of college attendance isn’t to simply make the best of them; it’s to create systems that admit the small number of socioeconomically disadvantaged students who do apply to college at preset and to build on these admissions statistics to achieve ever-greater levels of equality. It’s this more ambitious goal for affirmative action – and my conviction that race-based systems are failing to achieve this goal – that leads to my support for class-based affirmative action; more fundamentally, it leads to my argument that class-based systems will not only improve classroom diversity, but also alleviate the underlying inequalities that currently prevent us from achieving this diversity.

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