At last week’s Democrat National Convention, former First Lady Michelle Obama scratched a 30 year-old intellectual itch.
In her electrifying speech, she invoked “the affirmative action of generational wealth” as one of the causes of persistent inequality in the United States. This was the same argument that I tried to make in my doctoral dissertation more than a quarter of a century ago—though not as effectively and succinctly as Mrs. Obama.
At the time (in the mid-1990’s), a group of white students successfully sued the University of Texas’ Law School in a case was Hopwood v. Texas. The University had rejected the applicants despite their competitive credentials. This was based on what the students perceived to be an unfair affirmative action admissions policy. The rejected applicants argued successfully—at least until the Supreme Court repealed the verdict in 2003—that affirmative action distorted the playing field for graduate school admissions.
After the verdict but before the Supreme Court weighed in, this ruling was a huge blow for those of us who believed in the positive power of affirmative action. My view was that affirmative action was an important strategy for equalizing opportunity. My dissertation hypothesis was that playing field for careers and life opportunities was already skewed. It favored the people who already had strong social ties to friends, families, and social ties in the labor force. Disbanding affirmative action would just tip the scales further toward white men from middle and upper-income families, who had historically benefitted from cultural norms and social connections.
I tried to approach my dissertation research with healthy skepticism. As much as I believed in the positive power of affirmative action in the U.S., I had a very different experience abroad. For my junior year of college, I had studied at the University of Delhi and lived in a hostel with students from across the country. Some were from middle-class Indian families. Others were students from what was called at the time, “scheduled tribes and scheduled castes (SC/STs).” This was India’s version of affirmative action.
The difference, though, was that affirmative action was largely helping the elites from the SC/ST communities. These were daughters and sons of government officials and business leaders and not people from disadvantaged backgrounds. In fact, these students came from substantially more wealth than our middle-class peers. My roommate was the son of a state Chief Minister and drove one of the few Toyota Land Cruisers in Delhi at the time.
Affirmative action policies in India had bred deep resentment. These became even more acute when the government announced early in the school year that it would reserve even more jobs in the government civil service for SC/STs. This announcement erupted in months of violent and desperate student protests. Students shut down the university, and more than 200 set themselves on fire. Many of my anti-affirmative action friends came home from daily battles with the police bloody and angry, feeling as though their career prospects had dimmed overnight. So, yes, affirmative action can be deeply flawed.
Despite these experiences, I still believed that the U.S. had targeted its affirmative action policies more effectively, but I was also open to learning more through my research. My assumption was that people with historically advantaged demographics were more likely than their peers to use social connections to find their first post-collegiate jobs and that these jobs would be more remunerative and have more intrinsic and extrinsic benefits. Previous research had found positive connections between social connections and job placement for other populations: early careers for unskilled and skilled workers in trades, as well as mid-career workers in professional fields. Surely this would be the case, too, with recent college graduates.
I used a large national database to examine these issues and regressed early career outcomes on demographics, college experiences, and job-search activities. What did I find? Well, as a start, my hypothesis was completely wrong: Use of social connections was actually negatively associated with immediate post-collegiate employment outcomes. Graduating college students who seemed to have been well placed in the social structure used their social connections less often than students from more disadvantaged backgrounds. Instead, it was the reputation of a student’s college, type of degree, and academic grades that were more closely linked to early post-collegiate jobs with the best salaries and benefits.
After a lot of hand-wringing and additional analysis and reflection, the results began to make sense. Employers look for different signals from prospective employees. For many job seekers, referrals from friends, family, and social connections increase their credibility and likelihood of being hired. This is definitely the case with early-career blue-collar workers, who often need people to “vouch” for them, as well as for mid-career white-collar workers, who have already started to develop professional relationships with peers and supervisors.
However, recruiters who were hiring recent college graduates were relying on different signals to evaluate their prospects. These included the colleges and universities students attended and the amount of job-specific preparation included in their coursework. This was particularly the case for students in more vocationally-oriented undergraduate majors (engineering, for example) who were job-ready by the time they completed their undergraduate degrees.
It was those of us in the social sciences and humanities, with fewer job-specific skills, who were more apt to use social connections for early post-collegiate jobs. It was also the case that our first jobs, which required fewer industry-specific prerequisites, brought lower salaries and benefits. We would at least require masters’ degrees to become higher earners. These were the reasons for the negative correlations between the use of social connections and early job outcomes for recent college graduates.
What, then, are the implications of these findings for affirmative action? In all honesty, it is difficult to say. The world has changed dramatically since I completed my dissertation in 1998. Women and people of color have deepened their inroads into the most remunerative occupations. To the extent that there are still demographic differences in more vocationally oriented undergraduate majors and pipelines to early post-collegiate careers, gender- and raced-based affirmative action may still make sense. In others, affirmative action based on these kinds of demographics may not make sense.
In either case, I still agree with Mrs. Obama’s view that intergenerational wealth and position is strong and skews the playing field. We still need to be vigilant, proactive, and affirmative in our action to promote equal opportunity. What are the best ways to do this? Here are three suggested actions:
- Consider rethinking the criteria for affirmative action. Perhaps there are still good reasons to maintain historical affirmative action priorities for women, people of color, and other groups in some instances. However, it could be time to consider different criteria based more on personal circumstances (for example, family income, first generation to attend college, and other historical personal challenges).
- Think as much about activities as access. The biggest lesson from my dissertation findings is that, at least for college graduates, it is the experiences students had in college that made more of a difference in their early career outcomes than their biological make-up. Future affirmative action initiatives should therefore think as much about how to organize the experience (for example, explaining to students the implications of the courses they take on salaries and career trajectories) as to promote admission itself.
- Recognize that affirmative action at one point in the educational or career process may not be enough. As I wrote previously, my review of the career literature found that social ties really did matter for some populations of job seekers. These included mid-career, white-collar professionals, who often rely on referrals or recommendations from previous peers and supervisors to build trust with prospective employers. This suggests that after following the Actions 1 and 2, it may still be important to think about ongoing affirmative actions over the course of a person’s career. This includes helping people to build professional networks and utilize those networks for longer-term support and transitions. Yes, professionals can grow many of those networks themselves, but “leveling the playing field” could still include periodic boosts for longer-term success.
What are your views about the future of affirmative action and targeted efforts to increase opportunities based on personal criteria? Please join the conversation and let us know what you think about this important and controversial issue.
