Israel is a serious country. It has to be or it will die.
America is increasingly a frivolous country.
There is a country with a race-neutral, class-based affirmative action policy that is large enough to study: Israel. The evidence there suggests that, far from being complementary, broad diversity and race-neutrality are conflicting goals.
In the mid-2000s, four of Israel’s most selective universities adopted an admissions policy that favored underprivileged applicants. The program is completely race-neutral and need-blind: Applicants are not evaluated on their ethnicity or their particular financial status. Instead, the emphasis is on structural determinants of disadvantage, such as applicants’ neighborhoods or the socioeconomic status of their high school (some individual hardships are also considered). This approach has deep roots in sociological research that shows that social structures, such as neighborhoods and schools, have a great impact on educational outcome.
The Israeli model of affirmative action does achieve widespread diversity because it considers several aspects of disadvantage. In addition to increasing geographic diversity, the program increases the number of students who are new immigrants and who come from poorer families and poorer neighborhoods.
But it achieved these goals at the price of ethnic diversity. Only half of all those students admitted under the program are ethnic minorities, that is, Jews of Asian or African origin and Arabs, the groups at the bottom of Israel’s social stratification system. If a race-based affirmative action policy had been implemented instead of this policy, the level of ethnic diversity would have been twice as high. Such a policy would also expand the level of socioeconomic and geographic diversity at the Israeli bastions of privilege, but not as much as the class-based policy did…
There is no silver bullet for generating broad diversity at elite institutions. On one hand, race-neutral models of preferential treatment cannot match the level of racial and ethnic diversity that race-based affirmative action can achieve. On the other hand, race-based affirmative action does not produce the same level of socioeconomic and geographic diversity at elite campuses.
