Reactions: Is It Time for Class-Based Affirmative Action?

The Chronicle of Higher Education Review
December 16, 2009


A new study from Public Agenda has found that the main reason students drop out of college is that they have to work. That raises the question: Has the time come for an affirmative-action policy based on socioeconomic status?
And that raises a further question: Are the selective institutions that could provide enough financial aid to needy students, so they could work less, doing enough to recruit them? In other words, should the discussion of retention include a discussion of class and admissions? The Chronicle asked a group of scholars and experts what they thought.
Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation:
Three trends are likely to push the idea of affirmative action for low-income students to the forefront in the next couple of years.
First, the enormous underrepresentation of low-socioeconomic students at selective institutions, always an embarrassment to higher education, is getting worse. A 2004 Century Foundation study found that at the most selective 146 institutions, 74 percent of students come from the richest socioeconomic quarter of the population, and just 3 percent from the bottom quarter, a roughly 25:1 ratio. Research by The Chronicle and others suggests that in recent years, the stratification has grown even greater, putting pressure on universities to take action.
Second, increasing attacks on race-based affirmative action will very likely push universities to put in place class-based programs as an indirect and legally sound way of promoting racial diversity. A new challenge to racial preferences at the University of Texas at Austin, currently before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, could prevail in the Supreme Court, where the new swing justice, Anthony Kennedy, dissented in the 2003 University of Michigan case supporting racial preferences. Meanwhile, Ward Connerly has plans to bring anti-affirmative-action initiatives to Arizona and Missouri in 2010.
Third, we have a liberal African-American president who is uniquely positioned to ease the transition from race-based to class-based affirmative action, having said that his own daughters don't deserve preferences in college admissions, and that low-income students of all races do. But if economically disadvantaged students are admitted to selective colleges through affirmative action, will they be able to graduate? With the right support programs, yes. As the new report from Public Agenda finds, students drop out not because they're unprepared, but rather because they are stretched financially and have to work to make ends meet. A forthcoming Century Foundation report by Edward Fiske finds that a new program, the Carolina Covenant, has increased graduation rates by ensuring that financial aid and support programs are in place for low-income students. Likewise, research by William Bowen and colleagues finds that students are more likely to graduate at selective universities than less-selective ones­­—even though the standards are more demanding—perhaps because selective institutions have greater resources to support students.
All of which is to suggest that class-based affirmative action won't lead unprepared low-income students to drop out. To the contrary, it should increase graduation rates—a central goal of the Obama administration.
Julian Bond, chairman of the NAACP and a professor of history at the University of Virginia:
I think the time has long passed for adding socioeconomic status to the categories of affirmative action, but it must not and cannot be viewed as a replacement for race. Poverty is not a proxy for race, and to pretend that it is would eradicate the initial rationale for affirmative action—to correct for society's demonstrable biases against people of color regardless of their socioeconomic status.
The murder some years ago of Bill Cosby's son by a white racist who later bragged about the shooting to his friends shows how feeble the Cosbys's great wealth was in protecting their son against this ugly virus. The recent news that black graduates of prestigious colleges and universities feel they must "whiten" their résumés to hide their blackness demonstrates how little effect affirmative action in its original iteration has today, and how our current substitution of "diversity" for actual race-based affirmative action has rendered the latter almost useless. How many of our colleges count students from Africa and elsewhere toward their "affirmative action" goals?
So bring on socioeconomic status. And while you're at it, bring back race-based policies—you cannot get beyond race without going to race.

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