From the issue dated February 13, 2004
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The Quota QuandaryThe United States is not the only country struggling with affirmative action in university admissions
The use of affirmative action in college admissions is often perceived, within the United States, as a uniquely American phenomenon, born from the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow laws. Such efforts to right historic wrongs have embroiled federal judges and litigants in mammoth, long-running cases, absorbed the attention of thousands of university administrators, and frustrated both supporters and opponents. Largely unnoticed by those mired in this debate, a number of other countries have also enacted preferential university-admissions policies in the past few decades. While each system was developed to meet the specific needs of a particular society -- whether it revolves around religion, ethnicity, race, or gender -- each country has wrestled with similar questions: How does one create a policy that helps the disadvantaged without hurting everyone else? Do the policies help or harm academic quality? And, most important, do they actually work? Typically, says Philip G. Altbach, director of the Center for International Higher Education, at Boston College, "it's a very mixed picture." This report looks at programs in three major countries: India, Brazil, and Malaysia. India has by far the most elaborate system in the world, with quotas absorbing half of all the seats in some of its public universities. Brazil is among the countries to introduce affirmative action most recently. The state of Rio de Janeiro instituted preferential admissions policies for black and mixed-race students just last year, yet they have already led to more than 200 lawsuits. Malaysia has taken the unusual step of dismantling its affirmative-action program in college admissions, which favors native Malays over those of Chinese heritage and other ethnic groups, because it has been harshly criticized for weakening the higher-education system. Those three countries are not alone. In sub-Saharan Africa, where only one out of four college students is female, several countries give female applicants bonus points on their national university entrance-examination scores. Some African universities also offer remedial science and math courses to borderline female candidates. And in China, students from the country's 55 officially recognized minority groups are granted additional points on their national entrance-exam scores, although many are still educated at separate universities built specifically for minority students. At the same time, most countries in Latin America, Europe, and Asia do not have anything approximating an affirmative-action policy in higher education. A New Phenomenon Mr. Altbach says several social forces explain the dearth of preferential university-admissions policies in many parts of the world. First, until recently higher education has been the preserve of the elite in most countries. Governments supported a relatively small number of public institutions to educate wealthy and middle-class students. "They went and no one else expected to go; therefore it wasn't an issue," says Mr. Altbach. The idea that a university education should be available to all, he says, is a relatively new phenomenon. Second, for affirmative action to take hold, a country has to have a clearly identifiable group that would stand to benefit from preferential admissions policies, Mr. Altbach says. Third, that group would need to have enough political power to push through such a policy. In Western Europe, where affirmative action is virtually unknown, most countries have historically been racially homogenous. Some do have sizable immigrant communities: Turks in Germany, North Africans in France, Africans in Belgium. But the groups are relatively young and have little political power, so the idea of reserving university places for them has rarely been discussed, says Jürgen Enders, director of the Center for Higher Education Policy Studies at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. "The U.S. has a much longer tradition of perceiving itself as a multi-ethnic country," he says. A university may establish an affirmative-action program on its own, of course. But those can also be controversial. For example, a right-wing French student group challenged in court a program offered by the Institute of Political Studies, a prestigious public university in Paris commonly known as Sciences Po. The program provides mentors and preferential admissions for students from high schools in poor immigrant neighborhoods. The group challenging the program argued that it violated constitutional guarantees of nondiscrimination, but the court disagreed. Despite their mixed track records, the number of affirmative-action programs may continue to grow, alongside the idea that everyone should have access to a university education. As in the United States, says Mr. Altbach, such programs are often perceived as a relatively simple way to give all students the chance to go to college. Burton Bollag, Wachira Kigotho, and Jen Lin-Liu contributed to this article. http://chronicle.com Section: International Volume 50, Issue 23, Page A38 | |||||||||||||||
Copyright © 2004 by The Chronicle of Higher Education