Reflections on Affirmative Action in Student Access to Higher Education globally

The programme included a panel session titled “Affirmative Action: A Global Perspective”. Affirmative action seeks to promote equal opportunities for under-represented groups. Its effectiveness and potential consequences are debated globally, with different countries implementing it in various ways. The panel session aimed to offer a historical framework of affirmative action policies worldwide.

The panel session was initiated by Imara V. Dawson, the Managing Director of the Michigan Program for Advancing Cultural Transformation (M-PACT), which is funded by the National Institutes for Health Faculty Institutional Recruitment for Sustainable Transformation Initiative (NIH FIRST) and the University of Michigan (UM).

The first panelist was Karin Fischer, the author of Latitudes, a weekly newsletter that provides critical news, incisive analysis, and behind-the-scenes observations on international education. Dawson was inspired to organize the panel, after reading one of Fischer’s articles titled “The Supreme Court ruled U.S. colleges can’t use race in admissions. It’s long been banned in France,” published in Latitudes: The Chronicle of Higher Education. Fischer was invited to participate in the panel discussion and to share the various perspectives she had covered in her article, which touched on affirmative action positions in Canada, France, South Africa and Brazil. (You can subscribe to Latitudes and download the article for free here).

The second panelist was José Celso Freire Junior, associate provost for international and associate professor in computer science at São Paulo State University (UNESP) in Brazil, and President of FAUBAI—the Brazilian Association for International Education. Freire shared the Brazilian approach to affirmative action, which reserves 50% of admissions to the top Brazilian public universities for students from public high schools, prioritising those from disadvantaged backgrounds: poor, Black, Mestizo and Indigenous students.

The third panelist was Orla Quinlan, Director of the Global Engagement Division, Rhodes University; Council member and President IEASA (2019-2020), who presented the South African approaches to affirmative action in student access to higher education. It was interesting to discover that, in most countries discussed, the term affirmative action is applied to student access to higher education. In South Africa, however, affirmative action is more commonly associated with employment equity, rather than education access. Engaging with colleagues on international panels often demands consideration of the contextual nature of different terminologies and concepts. For example, to measure progress since the Apartheid years, South Africa still employs the socially constructed, racialised categories White, Indian, Coloured, and Black.  In South Africa, the term “Coloured” is commonly used as a descriptive term for a group of South Africans with a distinct cultural identity. However, in the US, “coloured” is not an acceptable descriptor, due to historical connotations, of it being used as a derogatory term to describe African Americans. The use of the term, in relation to South African policies, had to be explicitly addressed at the outset of the presentation. During the discussion, Quinlan proceeded to explain the historically disadvantaged groups in South Africa. She continued by highlighting the prioritisation of academically high-achieving students from disadvantaged backgrounds, who are eligible for NSFAS funding, as well as South Africa’s 5% quota commitments to students from neighbouring countries in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries.

In the discussions that followed, the panel was asked if they could ever envisage a time when affirmative action would not be needed. Quinlan responded that, in her view, “While the nature and the details of affirmative action polices might shift overtime, there will , most likely, be groups, outside of the structures that work for dominant groups, who will need policy support to have equitable access, in the foreseeable future”.