Guest Post: A New Way on Affirmative Action

By Richard D. Kahlenberg

Next week, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals will hear a new challenge to racial preferences at the University of Texas. The litigation once again raises the question: should programs continue to emphasize race or should they shift their focus to alternatives such as economic disadvantage?

Currently, most colleges say they consider both factors but in fact most put a much greater emphasis on race. The Mellon Foundation’s William Bowen has found that for students within a given SAT range, being an underrepresented minority increases one’s chances of admission by 28 percentage points. (That is, a white student with a given score might have a 30 percent chance of admission, but an African-American or Latino student with a similar score would have a 58 percent chance of admission.) By contrast, Bowen found, students from poor families receive “essentially no break in the admissions process; they fare neither better nor worse than other applicants.” 

Likewise, a new analysis by Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade and his coauthor Alexandria Walton Radford finds that, at highly selective private colleges and universities, the boost provided to African-American applicants is worth 310 SAT points (on a 400-1600 scale), compared with 130 points for poor students. Moreover, the 130 points is an average amount that is distributed unequally by race. Comparing students with similar academic records, Espenshade and Radford find that being low-income increases the chances that black, Hispanic, or Asian students will be admitted to private institutions, but significantly reduces the chances that a white student will be admitted. With a similar academic record, a poor white student has just an 8% chance of admission, compared with a 28% chance for upper-middle-class whites, and an 87% chance for low-income blacks.

But are racial disadvantages that students face in the real world really substantially larger than socioeconomic disadvantages as current university practices might suggest? Quite the opposite. According to a new study by Anthony Carnevale and Jeff Strohl, published in a volume I edited entitled Rewarding Strivers, when other factors are controlled for, on average, being black as opposed to white, costs a student 56 points on the SAT (on a 400-1600 scale). By contrast, being socioeconomically disadvantaged predicts an SAT score 399 points lower than the most advantaged student. For example, having a father who is a laborer as opposed to a physician costs 48 points; attending a school where 90 percent of classmates are low-income compared to one where students are more affluent costs 38 points; and having a parent who is a high school dropout as opposed to highly educated costs 43 points. All in all, the combined socioeconomic disadvantages are seven times as significant as racial disadvantages per se.

Because colleges tend not to factor in socioeconomic disadvantage into admissions decisions, the economic disparities on campus are enormous. According to a 2004 Century Foundation study, at the most selective 146 colleges and universities, 74 percent of students came from the top socioeconomic quarter of the population, and just 3 percent from the poorest. In other words, you are twenty-five times as likely to run into a rich kid as a poor kid on the nation’s selective campuses. To their credit, institutions of higher education have been concerned about ensuring racial diversity, but we must move beyond the narrow question of “what color skin the rich kids should have,” as critic Walter Benn Michaels has observed.

In recent years, there has been a flurry of activity aimed at addressing financial barriers to college. Among the leaders has been the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, which announced in October 2003 the Carolina Covenant — a free financial ride (no loans) for high-achieving, low-income students. So committed to the issue was UNC’s chancellor, James Moeser, and financial aid officer, Shirley Ort, that the two organized a national conference, held in Chapel Hill in September 2006, that identified 24 schools with new financial aid initiatives. A year later, the number had risen to 44. Today, it stands at nearly 100.

But financial aid, without affirmative action for low-income students, has by itself proven insufficient. Despite the adoption of no-loan policies, some reports suggest that most selective institutions actually are headed in the wrong direction regarding economic diversity. In 2008, The Chronicle of Higher Education found that the overall percentage of students receiving Pell Grants declined at the wealthiest 75 private and 39 public colleges and universities between the 2004–05 and 2006–07 academic years. Similarly, in the fall of 2009, the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education reported that despite financial aid initiatives, between 2003-04 and 2008-09, only seven of 30 of the nation’s top universities saw an increase in low-income students.

Some argue that introducing affirmative action for economically disadvantaged students would result in an influx of under-prepared students at selective colleges. But the evidence suggests that it would not. As Carnevale and Stephen Rose found in the 2004 Century Foundation study referenced earlier, a pure class-based affirmative action model could increase the representation of students from the bottom socioeconomic half from 10 percent currently to 38 percent at the most selective 146 colleges and universities, and graduation rates would be similar to those found under the existing system, which already provides preferences for legacies, and athletes, as well as minority students. These findings track with a 2007 research report from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation and Civic Enterprises, which identified 3.4 million high-achieving, low-income K–12 students, defined as those coming from families below the national median income and scoring in the top academic quartile.

What will it take for universities to consider economic disadvantage seriously in admissions? Evidence suggests that in places where racial affirmative action is banned, higher education will take steps to use socioeconomic indicators as an indirect way to achieve racial diversity. That is why the challenge to affirmative action being argued next week involving the University of Texas is so important. It may be that higher education will take on profound class inequality aggressively on campuses only if there is a push — simultaneously — from two very different forces: a conservative U.S. Supreme Court, which curtails the use of race, spurring liberals to look to class; and a liberal U.S. president, who pushes for a strong class-based alternative, and the funding to make it a reality.

Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, is the author of The Remedy: Class, Race, and Affirmative Action. Portions of this essay are drawn from the introductory chapter of Rewarding Strivers: Helping Low-Income Students Succeed in College. Kahlenberg’s views are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Higher Ed Watch or the New America Foundation.