Affirmative action occupies a telling place in a nation painfully aware of its racial inequities yet painfully divided over how to solve them.
Great numbers of Americans support the overarching goals of assuring equal access to educational opportunity and maintaining racial diversity in the country’s institutions of higher learning. At the same time, polls show Americans are deeply conflicted – often along racial lines – about policies that achieve those goals by allowing colleges to use race as a factor in their admissions decisions.
The latest chapter in this national struggle was supposed to come with the U.S. Supreme Court’s consideration of an affirmative action case involving a white student and the University of Texas. But the ruling – announced Monday amid much anticipation – merely sent the case back to the lower courts for reconsideration.
Afiirmative action, in its threadbare form, lives for now. But there was enough in Monday’s opinion to suspect it will be diminished further in time.
All of which makes it an opportune moment to think again about what some people think could be a fairer and more palatable way of ensuring diversity on America’s campuses – affirmative action based on class. The idea seems simple enough: This approach would give poor students of any race a helping hand into college, and any policy that gives an admissions boost to lower-income students would naturally benefit significant numbers of black and Latino students.
Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the progressive think-tank The Century Foundation, is one of the principal proponents of what has come to be called “the economic integration movement.”
“My primary interest is in ensuring that we have a fair process that looks at the biggest disadvantages that people face today, which I see as class-based,” Kahlenberg said in a recent interview. “That will end up helping low-income and working-class students of all races.”
Kahlenberg knows that many dispute this belief. But he says skepticism directed at the class-based solution has to be weighed against its dim alternative: If race-based affirmative action disappears with no program to replace it, African Americans and Latinos on college campuses will disappear too. Studies show that African-American and Latino enrollment at the nation’s top 200 colleges would plummet by two-thirds if colleges stopped considering race when deciding whom to accept.
Yet ignoring race does not wipe its effects away. A formula that uses class while disregarding race may be politically popular, but many scholars say race remains so powerful a factor that a class-based system would seriously reduce black and Latino representation at American colleges from their current levels.
At the heart of their argument: Poor white Americans are still privileged when compared to poor African Americans and Latinos. Use class as the basis for admissions preference, studies show, and the nation’s colleges will be flush with poor white students. “There are disadvantages that accrue to African Americans and Latinos that are not explained by class,” said Anthony Carnevale, director of the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. “You simply cannot get race by using class.”
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