Ross Douthat’s column in yesterday’s New York Times suggested that in building a diverse class, elite universities and colleges should make room for more white working-class conservatives from rural areas and Red States. For more than a decade, I’ve pushed for greater socioeconomic diversity on college campuses so one of my daughters understandably called me to celebrate the Douthat piece.
In fact, however, I think Douthat’s rationale is all wrong. Yes, we should have more working-class kids at selective colleges and universities, but not just to make the conversations more interesting and to build a future elite that understands working-class whites. More fundamentally, we should want more poor and working-class kids at selective institutions because a fair meritocracy requires consideration of economic disadvantage—a point surprisingly missing in Douthat’s analysis.
Douthat starts by invoking Pat Buchanan, who a number of years ago took the argument of diversity to its logical extreme to suggest that over-represented groups, like Jews and Asians, should make room for white Christians at selective institutions. To most fair-minded people, Buchanan’s argument exposed the fallacy of the pure diversity rationale—that admissions is all about power and giving each group its “fair share”in order to have all views represented on campus.
Indeed, the original idea behind affirmative action wasn’t that each group had a political right to a slice of the elite academic pie. Nor was it to provide African-Americans representation on campus so that white students could learn from black students—a notion introduced by Harvard University and written into law by Justice Lewis Powell in the 1978 Bakke decision. Instead, the strongest rationale was that as a matter of fairness, students who came from racially and ethnically disadvantaged groups faced extra obstacles, and an admissions officer, in order to more accurately measure long-term potential, should consider an academic record in light of the obstacles that a candidate has overcome. This meritocratic ideal, which seeks to identify diamonds in the rough, would never give a leg up to a wealthy Evangelical conservative because what matters is obstacles overcome, not whether a student enriches the conversation.
Of course, the fair admissions rationale for affirmative action always should have considered economic obstacles, and should do so especially today, now that socioeconomic disadvantages have become far more powerful than purely racial ones. A recent analysis by Anthony Carnevale and Jeff Strohl, published in a Century Foundation book I edited entitled Rewarding Strivers, finds that a full complement of socioeconomic obstacles predicts an SAT score 399 points lower than the most advantaged student’s (on a 400-1600 scale), while being African American predicts a score just 56 points lower. In practice, however, today universities provide far greater weight to race than class. Researchers Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford find that on average, the private elite universities they studied only give a 130-point SAT boost for low-income students, compared with a 310-point boost for African-American students.
But it’s even worse than that, as Douthat alludes to in his article. Comparing students of similar academic record, 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 has just an 8% chance of admissions, compared with a 28% chance for upper-middle-class whites, and an 87% chance for low-income blacks.
Highly talented poor kids of all colors deserve to get in not just because they will enhance the climate in elite schools (which they will); and not because Pat Buchanan thinks every demographic block deserves a proportionate share (which they don’t). High-achieving, low-income students deserve to have a seat at the table because they’ve worked hard and done well, despite what research suggests are very formidable obstacles. Elite private universities have recognized this in the case of poor blacks, which is all to the good. That low-income whites with comparable academic records have less of a chance of getting in than their more advantaged peers is shameful for institutions that normally pride themselves on being more fair-minded than conservative commentators.