Do Universities Need Quotas?

In one of the latest developments in a long-standing debate over affirmative action, some countries are considering adopting educational quotas at universities. In India, for example, a proposed law would reserve 50% of places in both public and private universities for students from minority groups. That's a huge number, when you consider that significantly less than 50% of the population in India is a member of a minority group.

Here in Brazil, universities are also considering whether to reserve half of university slots for non-white students. That is an enormous number, when you consider that white students make up the vast majority of Brazilian students who pass the qualifying exam to enroll in university. Reserving 50% of spots for students on the grounds of race would force school officials to turn away white students who passed the entrance exam and to accept instead non-white students who didn't pass it.

Critics of the plan have also said schools would experience a higher dropout rate, because students with limited resources might not be able to afford books or even bus fare to the campus, not to mention private university tuition fees.

There are many signs that non-white students are struggling in the current system. According to a 2000 government census, white Brazilians receive an average of two extra years of schooling relative to Brazilians who self-identify as black or Indian. Non-white students are several times more likely to be illiterate than whites. Unipalmares, a university in Sao Paulo dedicated to helping black Brazilians succeed in school, estimates that blacks make up only two percent of students in the country's universities. Yet approximately six percent of Brazilians are black, and another 40% say they are of mixed race.

Those statistics demonstrate that establishing racial quotas isn't easy in a country such as Brazil. When nearly half of all Brazilians are multiracial, how can we draw lines on the basis of race? For instance, how might schools treat a fair-haired, white-skinned, middle-class Brazilian student who claims she should get preferential entry to medical school because her great-grandfather was an Amazonian Indian?

Another element should be included in debates over quotas, which would complicate things even further: gender. At the health sciences center of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, where I have my lab, the majority of students thronging the hallways and classrooms are female. I realize that this apparent disproportion in numbers may be due to male students skipping more classes than female students, but an admittedly small sample from the Institute of Medical Biochemistry shows that in 2006, 70% of master's graduates and 60% of doctoral graduates were women.

I don't know why there are fewer men in my department, but it's surely not an issue of disadvantage, which is at the heart of disparities in race or wealth. Still, any disparity deserves a close look. Seeing female faces all around me forces me to consider what this gender disparity means for the future of the Brazilian scientific workforce. Statistics show that women are more likely than men to drop out of the workforce to raise a family. In the United States last year, women made up 49% of graduating medical students but only 32% of medical faculty members.

So, although more women may be qualified to conduct research, what is the cost benefit to society of having a greater number of more-qualified women scientists working fewer years versus a smaller number of less-qualified men who spend more time in the workforce?

I wonder: To make sure that our future workforce is strong and diverse by training a diverse group of people who will contribute to their chosen fields, shouldn't there be a quota of at least half of university places reserved for men?

Jack Woodall is former director of the Nucleus for the Investigation of Emerging Infectious Diseases in the Institute of Medical Biochemistry at Brazil's Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.