Who's truly disadvantaged? Look at single parenting, not race or poverty

Growing up in a single-parent family is a huge disadvantage in life, writes Fordham's Michael Petrilli in Forbes. If racial preferences in college admissions are replaced by breaks for students from low-income families, he'd like to add family structure into the mix.

Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA), which precipitated the Supreme Court decision on affirmative action with a suit against Harvard and the University of North Carolina, may file suit again to force elite universities to explain how they've managed to keep their numbers of black students high. SFFA suspects “racial preferences on the sly.”

It's not entirely clear that the court will let universities create preferences based on family poverty, especially if it's done to create racial diversity, writes Petrilli. However, he thinks an applicant who has overcome adversity is a good bet to deal with the challenges of college.

In his opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that universities may take into account family finances, “status as a first-generation college applicant” and other “race-neutral” factors.

"If the goal is to find a measure connected to real disadvantage that also shows the widest gaps between Black students on the one hand and Asian students on the other, it’s not income, wealth, or other traditional indicators of socio-economic status. It’s the proportion of students growing up in one-parent households," Petrilli writes.

A recent study by SUNY at Albany scholars looked at children who were in kindergarten in 2010–11 and would be old enough to be in college today, he writes. "Black kindergarteners were almost twice as likely as their Asian peers to come from families making less than $50,000 a year — 76 percent versus 39 percent. But they were almost seven times more likely than their Asian counterparts to be living with a single mom or dad — 47 percent versus seven percent."

Petrilli wants to see "Ivy League universities and their ilk — the high churches of today’s progressive elite — to go on record saying it really is harder for kids to grow up with a single parent, that one reason Black children fare worse on a range of outcomes is the dearth of two-parent families in the Black community, and that they believe this so fervently that they are willing to provide an admissions preference for applicants who experience this form of disadvantage."

The advantage of growing up with a father is growing, writes Daniel A. Cox of the Institute for Family Studies. Fathers are doing more parenting in two-parent families, though not as much as mothers.

This generation of fathers are more emotionally engaged with their children, according to a  new report from AEI’s Survey Center on American Life, Cox writes. "Fifty-seven percent of young adults raised in two-parent households report that they could rely on both their mother and father for help with a personal problem, while only 40% percent of Americans aged 50 or older report the same."

However, fewer Americans are being raised in two-parent households, he writes. Nearly half of young people are missing out on what Melissa Kearney calls The Two-Parent Privilege.

When I think of all the advantages I've had in life -- and they are many -- the most important is being raised by two competent parents in a strong, supportive family.