Affirmative Action: Could Class Trump Race?

[eridani]

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/05/15/study-suggests-class-based-affirmative-action-could-increase-racial-diversity

College officials are anxiously awaiting a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court on whether they may continue to consider race and ethnicity in admissions decisions. Many expect the court to limit the consideration of race, and some fear an outright ban.

But a study that will be published this summer in the Harvard Law & Policy Review suggests that class-based affirmative action could yield more spots not only for students from low-income backgrounds, but also for underrepresented minority students -- without the consideration of race. (A preliminary version of the article has been released by the Social Science Research Network.) The study could be significant because it uses a different way of identifying talent from low-income groups. Further, experiments with this system at the University of Colorado at Boulder have found that it increases racial diversity of the admitted applicant pool. The most common critique of class-based affirmative action to date has been that it results in a decrease in the number of minority applicants who are admitted.

The study does not urge the Supreme Court to bar the consideration of race. In fact, the paper argues that "there are good reasons to maintain race-conscious admissions policies and separate good reasons to consider class in the admissions calculus." But the authors -- Matthew N. Gaertner, a research scientist at Pearson's Center for College and Career Success, and Melissa Hart, associate professor of law at the University of Colorado -- note that many Supreme Court watchers believe that there are "five votes to overturn or significantly curtail" the consideration of race. And particularly in this environment, they argue that the Colorado data suggest that colleges need to consider class-based approaches to maintaining diversity.

[Nye Bevan]

1. A poor white kid living in a trailer park in Mississippi SHOULD be given preference

over the son of two millionaire black lawyers living on the Upper East Side in Manhattan.

Socio-economic privilege is real and needs to be addressed.

[meow2u3]

2. I've been saying this for years

Class-based affirmative action will allow ALL low-income individuals to escape from poverty with hard work. It still benefits minorities because more minorities are poor, but it will also benefit poor whites because more poor people are white simply because whites make up 2/3 of the American population.

If we adopt class-based affirmative action, it has a chance to blunt the "reverse racism" claim by bigots.