SAN FRANCISCO ― Class-based affirmative action programs can do more to increase socioeconomic mobility than
race-based programs alone, according to sociology professor Sigal Alon of Tel-Aviv University, speaking recently at the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education where she presented her book Race, Class, and Affirmative Action.
In the book, Alon compared the quality and effectiveness of affirmative action policies in the United States and Israel, and arrived at conclusions that have caused American administrators to take notice. For starters, said Alon, the polarized debate over affirmative action that pits “those who are rooting for racial preferences [against] those who are rooting for class-based preferences” misses the bigger picture: to expand diversity and address inequality.
“There is no silver bullet, no one prototype, whether race-based or class-based affirmative action, to deal simultaneously with all aspects of inequality. We’re not going to find a solution in any one of these policies,” she said. Rather, institutions should be looking for “a hybrid design that combines different elements” of affirmative action models.
One place to look for success in these programs, she said, is Israel. Alon, who studies social stratification and mobility with a focus on class, gender and racial-ethnic inequalities in education, looked at an innovative class-based affirmative action policy enacted over the last decade at one of Israel’s leading institutions. The program, which targeted disadvantaged students from poor high schools and neighborhoods, remains the first and only race-neutral, class-based affirmative action plan implemented worldwide — one in which the ethnic origin of applicants was not considered.
In Alon’s study, 55 percent of the people who benefited from class-based affirmative action came from Israel’s two main ethnic minority groups: Israeli Arabs and Mizrahi Jews, whose roots are Sephardic. “Had the program looked at ethnicity, it would have all gone to these two groups,” said Alon. A follow-up to that program, in 2012 in Brazil, saw the enactment of an even newer affirmative action model based on the Law of Social Quotas, which mandated that public universities reserve half their slots for low-income students from public high schools.
Brazil’s program wasn’t race-neutral, but race-sensitive, said Alon, and both countries managed to adopt hybrid designs, “cross-breeds that incorporate elements from different prototypes, which give greater potential to generate broad diversity.”
