Opportunity-Based Affirmative Action
Race-based affirmative action policies are likely to remain under threat through at least 2020. Fortunately, there is an alternative policy…
Race-based affirmative action policies are likely to remain under threat through at least 2020. Fortunately, there is an alternative policy that could conceivably replicate the integrative effects of race-based affirmative action, while remaining on stronger legal and political footing: opportunity-based affirmative action. Moreover, opportunity-based affirmative action has a bevy of positive features that race-based policies do not.
I. OPPORTUNITY-BASED AFFIRMATIVE ACTION
Conceptually, opportunity-based affirmative action is simple. During the application process, colleges, universities, and other institutions collect information on applicants’ previous home addresses. They also collect information on all schools previously attended.
Through a simple point system, applications are assigned “opportunity scores” on the basis of this residential and educational history.
Neighborhoods or schools produce higher scores if they are:
a) historically underrepresented in higher education;
b) nonwhite segregated, with the awarded score corresponding to the degree of segregation; and
c) economically disadvantaged or segregated, with the awarded score corresponding to the degree of poverty and poverty concentration.
Scores are readjusted annually to represent demographic changes. In addition, scores are weighted by duration of residence or attendance.
To illustrate:
An applicant who spent her entire early life in high-poverty, nonwhite segregated neighborhoods and schools would receive the highest preference.
An applicant who spent her entire life in high-poverty, racially-integrated neighborhoods and schools would receive a moderate preference.
An applicant who spent half her educational career attending a high-poverty, segregated school, and half her educational career attending a low-poverty, integrated school, would receive a moderate preference.
An applicant whose neighborhood transitioned from integrated to segregated during the course of her residence would receive a moderate preference.
Although opportunity scoring can deal flexibly with the widely varying scenarios above, and many others, the end result is always the same: a single numeric score assigned to each student. This score can be used to rank applications or otherwise incorporated into an admissions process.
Because applicants from racially segregated areas would receive the highest preference scores, and because, by definition, most residents of segregated areas are nonwhite, admitted applicants from those areas are also disproportionately likely to be nonwhite. In this manner, opportunity-based affirmative action replicates the basic function of race-based affirmative action — but with a number of critical differences.
II. ADVANTAGES
Opportunity-based affirmative action has a variety of positive features — some intuitive, others less so. These increase its effectiveness as a tool for promoting racial, economic, and geographic diversity and integration; insulate it from potential legal challenges; increase ease of administration; and produce positive externalities for society at large.
Individually Race-Blind
First and foremost, opportunity-based affirmative action lacks the single feature that most troubles political opponents of traditional race-based affirmative action: it does not treat two individuals differently on the basis of their race. Indeed, it could be conducted in an entirely race-blind setting, with no information about an individual’s racial characteristics whatsoever. Although opportunity scores take into account factors like racial segregation, a white applicant hailing from a heavily segregated neighborhood and school would receive an identical opportunity score as a nonwhite applicant from the same same neighborhood and school.
Narrowly Targeted Intervention
Traditional race-based affirmative action seeks to reduce two harms. The first is the absence of certain racial groups at institutions of higher learning, which prevents those institutions from availing themselves of the well-known benefits of demographic diversity. The second is the broader injustice that arises when those groups are condemned to life-long, systemic inequality — injustice that self-perpetuates when those groups are less competitive for higher education.
These harms fall heavily on nonwhite students, but are not an inherent feature of nonwhiteness. Instead, there are a variety of external factors that make nonwhite students less competitive applicants.
One of these is economic disadvantage. But as many people have noted, economic affirmative action is an imperfect replacement for race-based affirmative action.
Much of the remaining disadvantage suffered by nonwhite applicants can be attributed to the tendency of those applicants to hail from neighborhoods and schools segregated on the basis of race. The list of social problems affecting segregated places is extensive — for starters, severe resource deficiencies, environmental and health hazards, disinvestment, overexposure to the criminal justice system. Moreover, racially and economically segregated neighborhoods and schools are often detached from social networks of opportunity, which can prove instrumental in determining individual outcomes. Anyone growing up in such a place — especially if they are from an otherwise disadvantaged family — is likely to encounter severe obstacles, especially compared to peers in more affluent and better-integrated areas.
But while exposure to these obstacles is strongly correlated with race, the correlation is not perfect. As a consequence, traditional race-based affirmative action can be fairly accused of being over- and under-inclusive.
Some nonwhite students — those in integrated or affluent neighborhoods or schools — may well never encounter the most severe impediments. Likewise, white students who find themselves in segregated schools or neighborhoods are likely to run into many (though not all) of the same problems as their nonwhite classmates. Because it treats race as a proxy for access to opportunity, traditional race-based affirmative action is blind to these nuances.
Opportunity-based affirmative action, by contrast, uses no proxy. Instead, it targets directly the students who are most likely to be disadvantaged, by directly weighing some the factors causing those disadvantages.
Avoids Racial Classification Issues
The need for traditional race-based affirmative action to racially “categorize” applicants can create difficult questions and problems.
For instance, relying on a student’s self-reported race can open the system to gaming by opportunistic applicants — or the fear of gaming, which, from a political standpoint, is equally toxic. Alternatively, the need to verify an applicant’s reported race places institutions in the uncomfortable role of evaluating racial identity. These problems will inevitably worsen if the percentage of Americans identifying as “multiracial” continues to increase.
In addition, traditional race-based affirmative action can force institutions to make difficult distinctions between nonwhite racial groups. For instance, a frequent source of controversy is the tendency of racial preferences to weigh against Asian Americans. But not all Asian American groups are overrepresented in higher educations — Hmong students, for example, are frequently underrepresented. Institutions can choose to recognize these underrepresented categories as separate groups, or not, but in either case they are forced to play the role of racial taxonomist.
Because it is individually race-blind, opportunity-based affirmative action mostly avoids these questions. To the extent that such questions do arise, they are based on measures of observed neighborhood and school outcomes, which can be empirically evaluated without making “correct” racial distinctions.
Self-Limiting
Opponents of race-based affirmative action frequently raise the question of when the practice should end. Although it is relatively easy to justify the existence of affirmative action — present-day and historical inequalities have clearly led to the underrepresentation of certain racial groups in higher learning and in the professional world — it is much more difficult to know when those inequalities have declined sufficiently to safely terminate affirmative policies. At bare minimum, ambiguity over this question provides rhetorical ammunition to political opponents of integration and diversity in higher education. This question has also been used to attack race-based affirmative action in legal contexts.
Opportunity-based affirmative action does not suffer from this problem. Because its racial component relies on observed segregation in neighborhoods and schools, it persists as long as that segregation persists. However, reduction or elimination of the underlying segregation results in a commensurate reduction or elimination of the awarded preference. In other words, it is self-limiting: it cannot persist beyond the elimination of the social problems it attempts to correct.
Ease of Administration
Race-based preferences have proven difficult to administer in a legal fashion. Although current American law permits institutions of higher learning to take race into account while evaluating applicants, it does not allow them to assign numerical scores or institute racial quotas. Instead, applicants’ races must be considered holistically, as part of a variety of factors impacting an admission decision.
In practice, this standard raises all manner of troubles. Although schools can attempt to avoid making applicants’ race a dispositive factor in admissions, even a “holistic” evaluation always risks encountering the “last person in” problem, where two otherwise-identical applicants are evaluated for a final seat, and the nonwhite applicant is chosen instead of the white applicant. In addition, larger schools, in which huge numbers of applicants are processed simultaneously, consistently encounter accusations and suspicions that their race-conscious admissions policies are in some fashion functioning as covert quotas or point systems.
Also, if a “holistic” admissions process is not creating a sufficient level of diversity, institutions have a limited set of options. Because applicants’ racial characteristics are not a quantified component of the admissions process, institutions cannot easily “weight” a particular racial group more highly. Targeting a racial group more aggressively can create the appearance of individual race-based admissions, and expose an institution to legal risk.
Because it is individually race-blind, opportunity-based affirmative action avoids these problems altogether. Freed from the concern that they are treating individual applicants differently on the basis of their race, institutions would be free to readopt easily-understood points-based admission systems. Indeed, they could be transparent about those systems if they wished, openly disclosing the degree of preference merited by a particular residential and educational history. This level of transparency could both facilitate a simpler admissions process, and allow institutions to pursue diversity more openly.
If an institution’s current opportunity-based preference is not producing sufficient diversity — along any dimension — the institution can freely re-weight the preference until the pool of admitted applicants improves.
Systemically Integrative
The final advantage of opportunity-based affirmative action is the most unique, and potentially most transformative: if adopted widely, it could have broad, positive systemic effects for currently-segregated neighborhoods and schools.
Because opportunity-based affirmative action is individually race-blind, it can be freely exploited by traditionally advantaged groups to gain an edge in the admissions process. For example, an affluent white family could enroll their child in a high-poverty, segregated school, to capture the benefit of that school’s preference in college admissions.
This, however, is not a defect of the policy. Instead, it represents a powerful bulwark against white flight, and potentially an incentive to proactively integrate neighborhoods and schools.
Experience suggests that affluent families will go to great lengths to obtain future educational and professional advantages for their children. In the present system, this often takes the form of destructive, exclusionary practices, such as enrollment in private or prep schools, relocation to white enclaves, or purchasing housing in the attendance zone of “good schools.” This in turn perpetuates and intensifies racial and economic segregation, and widens the divide between white and nonwhite families.
Opportunity-based affirmative action flips these incentives. In an opportunity-based system, white or affluent families could obtain substantial admission preference only by staying in place, or seeking out disadvantaged institutions. Indeed, just as many real estate brokers now openly disclose the quality of a neighborhood’s schools, there is nothing preventing the open disclosure of the preference associated with a school or neighborhood, as a form of marketing to potential new residents.
Like the policy itself, this incentive is self-limiting. If only a few white or affluent families attempt to exploit these preferences, an area is likely to stay segregated, and therefore maintain its preference. The vast majority of the people eligible for that preference remain truly disadvantaged.
Alternatively, if many white or affluent families attempt to exploit opportunity-based preferences, the composition of high-preference areas is likely to change. As those areas become more racially and economically integrated, their preference will be reduced. Thus, the preference provides a short-term incentive for broad residential and educational integration, but erodes before it can permanently confer advantages to an already-advantaged class.
III. IMPLEMENTATION
The primary obstacle to the implementation of opportunity-based affirmative action is practical. In order to function fairly, an opportunity-based system needs a constantly-updated, nationwide measure of geographic and educational opportunity. In short, it needs a database of all inhabited areas — preferably on as fine a scale as possible — and all schools, with each area and school assigned an opportunity score on the basis of the factors delineated above. Maintaining such a database is no small feat.
The operation of an opportunity database by individual institutions is likely to be prohibitively expensive. Moreover, if institutions scale areas differently, the predictability of the preference is reduced and some of the systemic advantages described above are likely to be lost.
A better solution is for a single consultant or agency to produce the opportunity database. This entity could be a private third party, or based out of an institution which has adopted an opportunity-based system. In either case, the agency would maintain and annually update the database, and, for a small fee, provide it to interested institutions for their own use. Institutions could in turn provide feedback about the opportunity scoring formula, or request that specific alterations be made to address individual institutional needs.