Want Real Affirmative Action? Don’t Look to Harvard.

Only a razor-thin portion of the American population attends elite institutions like Harvard. The Department of Education reports that well under 1 percent of American undergraduates matriculate into schools that, like Harvard, admit less than 10 percent of their applicants. And perhaps more surprising, only 4 percent of undergraduates attend schools that admit less than 25 percent of their applicants. When we argue about affirmative action at schools like Harvard, we are arguing about how to make the 1 percent more equal rather than arguing about how to make the 99 percent better off.

Most students in the United States attend schools like mine. I teach at a mid-size public university that many educational researchers would characterize as “broad access.” Each year we accept greater than 50 percent of our applicants. (75 percent of American students attend institutions with such acceptance rates). In many respects, my students are hard to characterize. A few are excellent and a few are in need of remedial courses, but most fall somewhere in a very broad middle. What is clear about my students is that they don’t seem to think too much about affirmative action in higher education. I asked them this past week, and none knew about the Harvard case.

I suspect my students don’t think much about race and admissions because at “broad access” schools, the student population is almost by definition racially diverse. “Broad access” means that the school looks like the society. Some of my students are white, middle-class kids of typical college age, but many are Asian-American or African-American or Indian-American. Many also find those categories a little puzzling because they were born in Haiti, east Africa, Brazil, Cambodia, or just about anywhere else in the world. My point is that such universities already practice transformative diversity — and most Americans attend my kind of school.

Unfortunately, this potential often remains unrealized. The broad-access public university has been systematically undermined by budget cuts to higher ed across the nation. These cuts have been well-documented, and I see their effects every day. My students aren’t thinking too much about the Harvard affirmative action case because they spend a tremendous amount of time thinking about how they are going to pay the tuition bill, not to mention the food bill. Some cash comes from Pell grants, tuition discounts, and work-study jobs, but for the most part it comes from the labor they do outside the university. And, they seem to work constantly. They work all night in warehouses 30 miles from campus and then take my 8 a.m. course because it’s on the way home. They work the register 40 hours a week at the corner laundry because the boss lets them do their homework when things get slow. They work in the home without pay, taking care of their grandparents because the family can’t afford eldercare. Sometimes they quit school for a semester to work on their uncle’s construction gang to make some cash to pay the next semester’s tuition.

I often don’t know how my students do college under these conditions. Too often they don’t make it too far, or they get interrupted for significant periods. Every semester at about this time—the midterm—several of my students simply disappear. What I often discover when I track them down is that the work—school combined with their full-time job— has simply become unworkable.

The research bears out the experience that I have in the classroom. Two preeminent economists of higher education, William G. Bowen and Michael S. McPherson, report that one of the central issues facing students is not the usual suspects like access to college or extreme student-loan debt. Most students who want to go to college in the United States can get into a college, and college is still a pretty good investment for most students. One of the most significant problems in American higher education is the completion of college once one is in. Bowen and McPherson in their 2016 book Lesson Plan, report that “the six-year completion rate for first-time, degree-seeking students in US colleges and universities who began post-secondary education in the fall of 2008 was 52.9.” Only about 1 in 2 students who enter college come out with a degree.

That is an incredible number, one that represents a fantastic waste of resources and a general societal failure. But, according to a 2017 study by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center the number is worse for Hispanic students: 46 percent. And worse still for African-American students: 38 percent.

Why are completion rates so abysmal? It is a difficult question because there are so many variables at work. But it is clear that the terrible results are produced in part by under-resourced teaching and advising, rising tuition costs, the complexity and corruption of the student loan systems, and the sheer amount of outside work students at universities like mine do.

Let me also call attention to the special kind of cruelty in all of this. For many of my students — and particularly my students of color—enrollment in the university is a hope not just for a set of skills but for a better future. For them higher education is deeply entwined with optimism about the future—call it the American dream. But each semester I see it take a cruel turn when students are worn down by what’s required to fund this dream.

I suspect that the debate over affirmative action at Harvard will at best have only a small, indirect effect on all of this. I would hate to see Harvard dismantle its policies on affirmative action, and I’d hate to see other colleges forced to do the same (although there are certainly many issues desperately in need of reform in elite college admissions). But if we are really interested in making institutions of higher education engines of equality rather than purveyors of a cruel hope, we would worry less about Harvard and invest more in universities where affirmation action is already built into the system.