The higher education space, both as a market and a phenomenon, is witnessing a period of exponential growth. Globally, higher education providers i.e. colleges and universities have increased by 51% in the last decade, of which the Global South accounts for an enormous 78% alone. Access to higher education has leapt with increased enrollment ratios, currently at an impressive high of 35%, indicating that there is some form of tertiary education available for most secondary school graduates. However, with the expansion and diversification of tertiary education providers, the quality of access and that of the education thus accessed has seen a gradual but complete shift. Instead of differentiating between those who have a university degree and those who do not, more and more emphasis is being placed on the kind of degree they have graduated with. We have moved past the days of inquiring whether someone has attended university. The infamous question now is: “Which university?”
With the qualitative gap between universities widening, the debate on access to education has experienced an evolution. Questions, concerns and assumptions both in favour of and against affirmative action assume a large part of these debates. However, my intention in writing this piece is barely to ascertain the centrality of affirmative action in higher education. I am interested, more so, in inquiring and exploring whether a narrative of quality education that global and regional top-ranked universities have been pushing for decades now is possible at all without a parallel provision of affirmative action. Is it prudential to envision a top-notch university to be an excellent apparatus of tertiary education despite no affirmative action?
A better quality of education has long been at the heart of the hype for top-ranked universities. In the United States, only the eight universities of the Ivy League club claim the highest prestige factor out of over 5000 universities in the country. Their quality of education, often considered “irrefutable” is rooted in the portrayal of a long overdue transformation that only these schools can offer. Such transformation is promised at three levels: a shift in the dynamics of the higher education space itself, provision of opportunities and academic excellence that transforms students as individuals and finally, the creation of a small but exceptional cohort of global leaders who can transform systems, institutions and cut through historical precedents. University of Cape Town, one of Sub-Saharan Africa’s oldest universities, and ranked amongst the top 200 universities worldwide describes itself as a community of “exceptionally talented…to change this world for better”. Harvard University, the dream school of the perfect, athletically built, academically exceptional and socially skilled protagonists in standard coming-of-age American shows borrows a similar vocabulary of a “better world”.
Such promises of quality education fare well as far as they concern individuals within these systems: their students and scholars. Graduates of top-ranked universities perform better in soft and hard skills and are consequently rated better than those from mediocre-rated universities by employers. However, while these universities stay true to their promises at an ideographic level, they increasingly under-deliver in terms of global transformation. Quantitatively, their shrinking selection rates underline their commitment to excellence, but qualitatively, they expose a mafia of exclusion and growing inequality. The selection processes of such universities are marked by aptitude tests and several soft criteria, the performance which is strongly determined by an individual’s socio-economic background and cultural affiliation(s). The degree of investment in a child’s education and extra-educational life is proportional to their performance in what colleges usually call “race-neutral admission criteria”. Students from higher-income backgrounds, whites and those with parents who availed tertiary education perform better in the Standardised Admission Test (SAT) used in colleges in the United States and now, increasingly outside it to assess a student’s suitability for admission. It is an obvious deduction even beyond statistics — those with access to resources and stable, supportive households will do better than those who are born at a disadvantage due to factors not in their control, constantly excluded from society or its upper echelons and regularly discriminated against.
Closer home, at Ashoka University, now ranked India’s number one private university, for example, the tools employed during the intake process followed by the kind of academic rigour that picks up pace as and when the semesters begin is linked to the kind of population the university represents. In a country where 65% of the population still lives in rural areas with meagre resources and a comparatively lower standard of living, the training to write extraordinary essays, present letters of recommendation and attempt a Cambridge-manufactured aptitude assessment is not only a luxury but indeed a far fetched one. The peculiar social divisions of caste and class result in such intersectional disadvantages that India’s level of senior secondary educational attainment (in 25-66-year-olds) is the lowest in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and its partner countries. Naturally, the proportion of first-generation learners eligible for college enrollment is hence destined to rise in the near future. In such a setting, a logistically exclusive admissions process perpetuates the legacy of social inequities. Whether at Harvard or Ashoka, colloquially called the ‘Harvard of the East’, the only way to maintain the fairness of admissions processes, uphold standards of excellence and also deliver on the promise of systemic change is to implement a program of affirmative action usually manifested through quotas or seats reserved for students from disadvantaged backgrounds.
The problem, however, is that these universities share a continued conviction that they can offer quality education and the best of tertiary development in the absence of any such provisions for affirmative action. In 2022 in the United States, Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), a group of individuals arguing against affirmative action by claiming it to be an instrument of reverse discrimination against whites, challenged Harvard University and University of North Carolina’s policy of race-conscious admissions.
Later in June 2023, the Supreme Court ruled in favour of SFFA, banning affirmative action in all colleges in the country, a practice that had already been adopted by a few states by then. In India, the clampdown on affirmative action has been perpetuated by private universities like Ashoka where reservation is not legally mandated as a uniform rule. The final discretion is in the hands of the state governments, which in Ashoka’s case has mandated some form of affirmative action for students from Haryana domicile. 10% of the total 25% quota would be in favour of those from scheduled castes within the domicile. Even notwithstanding allegations of the university not following the said guidelines, Ashoka with only 5.54% of its undergraduate student body (NIRF Rankings, 2024) from disadvantaged backgrounds (Scheduled Castes + Scheduled Tribes + Other Backward Classes) as opposed to the centrally mandated 49.5% in public universities, is only one of the many universities that follow. Ashoka’s percentage of undergraduate students from disadvantaged backgrounds has gone down from 11.4% in 2022 and 6.80% in 2023 to 5.54% in 2024. However, it is not Harvard or Ashoka or any other elite university that is to be blamed alone; there is no one hotspot of exclusion in higher education — there are only manifestations and exemplifications. The mafia of exclusion is a parasite that breeds on the false promise of transformative education and contrary to what the grand structures which house it suggest, it is hollow and detrimental to us all. It is a slow poison eliminating any and all possibilities of a better future.
However, in the spirit of my caveat earlier, beyond moralistic concerns of equality and inclusion that can vary from person to person, an imagination of quality education and attainment of a better future through it is in fact also rationally impossible without some form of affirmative action. That is because with such less representative capacity, universities may produce individual success stories but as a whole, these successful individuals will still fail to represent the pursuit of a better world for all of us. In a country like India, for instance, where the percentage of disadvantaged sections (Scheduled Castes + Scheduled Tribes + Other Backward Classes) is reported to be over 69% at modest and 74.5% if data from the Mandal Commission Report of 1980 holds true, a university with a meagre 11% population of such sections not only under-represents the quantitative majority of the population but also implicitly ensures that its success is driven by such restricted pool of students which makes it eventually disproportional to the country’s overall progress. So when Justice Robots, the United States Supreme Court Judge who ruled against affirmative action in the country remarked that “[affirmative action] rests on the pernicious stereotype that a black student can usually bring something that a white person cannot offer”, the truth was actually otherwise. A black student brings with them a capacity to represent 47.9 million people most of whom have endured centuries of oppression and continuing discrimination; the student can potentially cut through systemic power imbalances for the entire community, the results of which no white student can match.
In the case of Ashoka whose founding statement like its global counterparts also rests on the transformation of the higher-education sphere in India, many of us are inclined to offer an infamous explanation of this design: that they are primarily research-oriented, rigorous institutions catering to the needs of extraordinary students with high success potential. However, while it may be tempting to tweak representation (or the lack of it, thereof) at Ashoka or elsewhere to other public institutions such as central universities that report a more heterogeneous and diverse cultural milieu, it is also effectively counterproductive. If public universities can cure the ills of Ashoka and its likes: what is the point of Ashoka as an institute of exemplary higher education, then? What is the point of a university whose very existence is a promise of an alternative faculty of education? What is also equally counterproductive is defining these universities’ alternative and world-class education in terms of only the rigour of their academics, outside the composition of it. For the quality of education is measured in its inclusivity and equity as much as in the standard of academic excellence. Therefore, the issue at hand is not only that race-neutral admissions in the United States, need-aware admissions in Africa or caste-neutral admissions in India do not deliver on their promise of a better world. It is also that they do not even deliver on their promise of a quality education, the basic tenets of which are equity and inclusivity.
What such exclusionary policies of admitting students do is create a false narrative of merit that propagates the preposterous misconception that if a non-reserved category student is denied admission despite scoring better than a reserved category student, it is a discriminatory practice on the university’s part. A large part of the problem is the erroneous but historical misunderstanding that merit and affirmative action contradict one another. For most, merit is an equaliser which is objective and numerical. But then the question arises: how can an equaliser be objective and so rigidly quantitative when inequality and oppression have created worlds of difference between social classes and castes? How can a low-income black student’s potential be measured through the same metrics that apply to a financially sound, socially privileged white student who has access to better social and economic opportunities in life? The answer is simple and clear: it can not. Affirmative action is the spinal framework of meritocracy without which it will crumble and turn to futility.
Besides concerns about how quality and transformative education can not be realised without affirmative action, implementing affirmative action also offers an additional advantage — it creates a diverse cohort of students which acts as a physical barrier to the implicit but definite propagation of social inequities often materialised through verbal and latent violence inside the classroom. The extent of representation is directly proportional to the ease of pedagogical violence. A diverse population obstructs projects of narrativising and propagating selected systems of thinking and living.
All proposed solutions to such systemic problems run through affirmative action but are easier discussed and deliberated than implemented. Most fear that creating more spots or reserving existing ones for those from disadvantaged groups will dilute the standards of education in such elite universities. Opening doors to a more diverse set of population, moreover, would mean fraternising with different forms of assessing students and embodying a greater idiom of affirmative action at all levels which is likely to be logistically tedious and uncomfortable for those who do not have a lived experience of such disadvantage. However, it is also indispensable to materialising the ‘effectiveness’ in higher education that mobilised the need for such universities in the first place and continues to punctuate their appeal even today.
The project, in the long term, is also incomplete without and calls for a reform in the educational practices at the school level. A more equitable and inclusive space for learning at the primary and secondary levels will bridge the gap between various segments of society, and facilitate an easier transition to university for all students. However, until university campuses continue to mark a dichotomy between the realities that exist inside them and those that thrive just when one steps outside, all other narratives of quality education are fed to futility. Imagining inclusivity would require us to tread paths and face realities that are uncomfortable and unsettling. One will realise that race-neutral or caste-less are terms that are tossed around to mean nothing more than deliberate race-blindness and caste-blindness. Our denial of these dismal social realities will not make them disappear magically: history presents a strong testimonial. Real quality education in universities would demand much more than a passive acceptance of the status quo and like Frost would say, the comfortable realities are lovely, yet dark and deep but we have promises to keep and miles to go before we sleep.
The writer is the co-editor of the Opinions department at The Edict (AY24-25).
(Edited by Srijana Siri)
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