This morning I read an article in the NYT that is very salient. For years I have been trying to get people to engage with me on the issue of economic inequality. Let me first say that I firmly believe that we still have systemic racism in our country. However, we also have systemic economic discrimination. But we ignore that. Even many minorities want to sweep that issue under the rug because it dilutes their message and complicates the issue. I get it. But that does not make it right. Maybe the Supreme Court’s recent decision will help all of us focus on economic discrimination as well.
A friend of mine, who came from a very modest background, has done well financially. He set up a scholarship at a University with the stipulation that the primary factor for receiving the scholarship be economic need. This was very important to him. He speaks to recipients after they have been selected for the scholarship. The first recipient was indeed a fine candidate. However, my friend was disappointed. The candidate did not come from a low-income economic background. So, my friend’s primary requirement to receive the scholarship was ignored. However, the candidate was black. Somehow, race had been used as a proxy for being economically disadvantaged. And that is one of the primary points of the article, major excerpts of which follow. By the way, I was a Pell Grant recipient.
Colleges’ Blind Spot
The University of Virginia, one of the country’s top public universities, enrolls a strikingly affluent group of students: Less than 15 percent of recent undergraduates at UVA have come from families with incomes low enough to qualify for Pell Grants, the largest federal financial aid program.
The same is true at some other public universities, including Auburn, Georgia Tech and William & Mary. It is also true at a larger group of elite private colleges, including Bates, Brown, Georgetown, Oberlin, Tulane and Wake Forest. The skew is so extreme at some colleges that more undergraduates come from the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from the entire bottom 60 percent, one academic study found.
It’s worth remembering that this pattern has existed despite affirmative action. Nearly every college with an affluent enrollment has historically used race-based admissions policies. Those policies often succeeded at producing racial diversity without producing as much economic diversity.
After the Supreme Court decision last week, much of the commentary has focused on how admissions officers might use economic data, like household income or wealth, to ensure continued racial diversity.
But racial diversity is not the only form of diversity that matters. Economic diversity matters for its own sake: The dearth of lower-income students at many elite colleges is a sign that educational opportunity has been constrained for Americans of all races. To put it another way, economic factors like household wealth are not valuable merely because they are a potential proxy for race; they are also a telling measure of disadvantage in their own right.
As colleges to respond to the court’s decision, there will be two different questions worth asking: Can the new system do as well as the old one at enrolling Black, Hispanic and Native students? And can it do better at enrolling lower-income students? So far, the public discussion has tended to ignore that second question.
Creating more economically diverse selective campuses is both difficult and possible.
It is difficult because nearly every aspect of the admissions system favors affluent applicants. They attend better high schools. They receive help on their essays from their highly educated parents. They know how to work the system by choosing character-building extracurricular activities and taking standardized tests multiple times. In many cases — if the applicants are athletes or the children of alumni, donors or faculty members — they benefit from their own version of affirmative action.
Some admission officers have recognized that talented students from humble backgrounds usually don’t look as polished. Their essays may be less impressive — perhaps because they received less editing from adults. The student’s summer activity may have been a job in her own impoverished neighborhood — rather than a social justice trip to an impoverished area overseas.
Many of these students have tremendous promise. By admitting them, an elite college can change the trajectories of entire families. A college dominated by affluent students, by contrast, is failing to serve as the engine of opportunity that it could be.
But many of the people who run elite colleges have had their own blind spot in recent decades. They have often excluded class from their definition of diversity. They enrolled students of every race and religion, from every continent and U.S. region, without worrying much about the economic privilege that many of those students shared.
Now that colleges are legally required to change their approach, they have a new opportunity to broaden their definition of diversity.
