Colleges can admit 'diverse' students without racial preferences

Racial preferences in university admission are divisive and unfair, argues Richard D. Kahlenberg on Politico. Diversity is a worthy goal, he writes, but it's best achieved by eliminating preferences for the privileged, such as children of alumni and faculty, and giving an admissions boost to students from lower-income families.

Kahlenberg is director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute and author of Class Matters: The Fight to Get Beyond Race Preferences, Reduce Inequality and Build Real Diversity at America’s Colleges.

Giving a break to economically disadvantaged students, regardless of their race, will boost racial integration, he argues. It has far wider public support than racial preferences.

"The dirty little secret of higher education" is that "race-based preferences disproportionately aided upper-middle-class students of color," he writes.

Kahlenberg has tried to persuade Democratic presidents to support this switch for decades. The politics were never in his favor.

In June 2023, when the Supreme Court struck down racial preferences in a decisive 6-3 vote, President Joe Biden called for a “new standard” to reward students who had overcome “adversity.”

That's starting to happen, Kahlenberg writes. Many schools have ended legacy preferences, adopted new "economic affirmative action strategies," expanded financial aid, changed recruitment and admitted more community college transfers.

The University of Virginia, for example, increased its share of Pell Grant eligible students from 14 percent five years earlier to 24 percent. At Duke, the share of Pell students doubled in just two years, from 11 percent to 22 percent. . . . Yale and Dartmouth both broke records for first-generation and low-income student representation.

Many selective colleges have maintained high levels of racial diversity, writes Kahlenberg. However, he concedes that some may be cheating, giving an adversity boost to black applicants but not to disadvantaged Asians or whites. There will be lawsuits, he predicts.

Class-based affirmative action is a legally defensible way to provide racial and economic diversity, he argues. It's also good politics.

I suspect working-class students of all races will be a bit more politically diverse than students from the same set of suburban and private high schools. But I don't expect colleges to give a break to applicants with conservative or libertarian or heterodox views.

Race-based affirmative action is wildly unpopular, writes James Traub in a New York Times review of Class Matters. "A politics in which elite liberals told ordinary white Americans that they had to make sacrifices — from which elites themselves were largely exempt — in order to compensate for historical injustices was an invitation to disaster."