What Comes After Affirmative Action?

The only silver lining in the Supreme Court’s rejection of affirmative action in higher education is that it has prompted much-needed soul-searching among affirmative action’s supporters. Many of us have long harbored serious concerns about how it has been conceived and executed, but have feared that voicing those concerns would do more harm than good. Convinced that it was better to have a flawed means of leveling the playing field than to have none at all, we sat on our objections. But now that affirmative action has been eliminated, the time seems ripe to consider fresh alternatives.

Happily, some have already begun to do so. A co-authored essay published in Slate back in February — at first tendentiously titled “Wealth: The Last Path to Diversity at College After SCOTUS Strikes Down Affirmative Action” — argued for class-based criteria in student admissions. Just this month, distinguished policy expert Richard Rothstein took to The Atlantic to describe the flaws in such a model, pointing out that it would do little to promote racial diversity since it would benefit white applicants overwhelmingly. His conclusion is that, no matter SCOTUS’s ruling on affirmative action, colleges should continue race-based admissions practices, even if it means breaking the law.

There’s much to admire in Rothstein’s courageous vision of a nation full of colleges willing to go full Henry David Thoreau in service of their ethical commitments, but this is not likely. Nor do I think his proposal advisable. As Bertrand Cooper explains — in an article that appeared merely days after Rothstein’s and in the same venue — race-based admissions support a sham sort of diversity, one that does little to challenge the status quo, which affirmative action was initially aimed at disrupting. Why? Because the black students who benefit from race-based admissions are, by and large, from the comfortable classes.

Cooper’s experience comports closely with my own. Like him, I grew up in very tough circumstances. Not only was I born black, gay, and poor in the United States; my parents were but children when I was conceived — my mother, 15; my father, 17 — and both struggled with addiction. (My father died at 50.) I started working full time when I was 14, all while attending one of the nation’s most-competitive public high schools, where I took 13 Advanced Placement classes in four years. My academic success won me flattering attention from scores of colleges (their mailed recruitment brochures constituted my primary college counseling), and I ended up at an elite place, Washington University in St. Louis, which awarded me a generous scholarship — though not quite enough to keep me from having to work full time while there, too.

One of the reasons I was obliged to work full time at WashU was social: It seemed everyone, white and black alike, was rich. Participating in basic social functions there, such as going to dinner on the weekends, required me to work 40 or more hours a week, on top of my full course load. After I graduated, I discovered that my anecdotal sense of the socioeconomic landscape of the student body was right. In 2017, The New York Times unveiled a search tool, based on the findings of academic researchers, that enabled users to examine how well schools advanced social mobility, which it determined by comparing students’ socioeconomic class when they enrolled to what it is when they reach their 30s. I was not surprised to discover that, out of the 300 schools comprising the data set, my alma mater fell dead last.

It was those years at WashU that inspired my initial misgivings about race-based affirmative action. Looking around at my black peers who had been admitted with me, I was at a loss to distinguish their trajectories from those of our allegedly more-privileged classmates. So many had gone to the same wealthy private schools, lived in the same posh neighborhoods, and took the same lavish vacations abroad that the white students had. Given their charmed lives, it seemed they had come from families in which affirmative action already had done its work, families that had escaped the cycle of socioeconomic oppression bequeathed them by slavery and Jim Crow. I thought it unfair that their race alone entitled them to the same preference in admissions that I had received. I still do.

At the same time, I am fully aware that, no matter how high a nonwhite person in the United States climbs, race still matters. Racial bias certainly plays a role in determining our opportunities and outcomes. But, as the recent lawsuits make clear, it is time to ask, “How much?” Now three generations beyond the inception of affirmative action, we need a metric that takes into account a fuller range of students’ opportunities and outcomes, not simply the important but limited criterion of race.

I propose resourcefulness. This metric would ask, “Given what this person had, what did this person accomplish? Given the access provided, what did this person do with it?” Prioritizing resourcefulness in admissions has many virtues. For one, it seems the most elegant way of accounting for obstacles when assessing merit — obstacles including those posed by such demographic factors as class, sexuality, ability, and, yes, race — in addition to certain other nondemographic factors influencing student outcomes, such as family trauma. Opponents and proponents of race-based admissions have worried that single-vector admissions policies (e.g., policies either race- or classed-based) exclude certain deserving populations. In its intersectional approach, resourcefulness could account for the role race played in the middle-class black applicant’s life, just as it could for the role played by class in the poor white applicant’s — along with any other hurdles those applicants had to jump. It would ask the same of the able-bodied white rich kid from a wealthy suburb for whom a high score on the SAT alone may not signify as much.

Beyond the fact that resourcefulness is a fairer metric, it is also less vulnerable to the objections to which race-based admission have been subject. Skeptics of race-based admissions have argued that privileging race in admissions is racist. While evaluating resourcefulness would necessarily involve thinking about race, it would do so indirectly and, I think, less crudely: race not as something that in itself makes one applicant more appealing than another but, rather, as something that has left that applicant with more or less resources to work with. If, for example, an admissions officer came across a black applicant with a 700 on the SAT but from a ZIP code where it is unusual for black students to do so, the officer could assume reasonably that this is a resourceful applicant — one who did more with less.

It is very difficult to imagine someone, on either end of the political spectrum, objecting to an admissions policy aimed at letting in resourceful students. On the one hand, the metric would appeal to the right’s oft-repeated concern for meritocracy and pluck. On the other, it would contribute to the left’s abiding commitment to social justice. Besides, it just makes sense to allot the most resources to students most capable of making good use of them. Because we live in an unjust society in which opportunities have not been distributed equally, looking at outcomes alone simply cannot tell us who can make best use of a college’s resources. But, if the goal of admissions offices is to admit students on the basis of the students’ capacity to make the most of what they have been given, admissions offices will go a long way in ensuring that their institutions are filled with the most deserving. And this approach would do much to mitigate the stigma that many poor nonwhite, but especially black, students feel in gaining admission to elite institutions. Knowing that they were admitted on the basis of their resourcefulness would be far more gratifying than believing themselves admitted as part of a quota.

The SCOTUS decision may strike some as an irrevocable setback. Seeming yet another blow in the salvo against social justice we’ve been witnessing, this development can appear a win for the wrong side. But it doesn’t have to be that way. What the court has offered is a chance to reimagine an admissions process grown stale — one conceived for an era considerably different from our own. Let’s seize this opportunity to remake the admissions process into something reflecting what we have learned in the decades since affirmative action was introduced. Using the admissions process to assemble resourceful student bodies, rather than quota-compliant ones, may help us do that.