opinion | Positive action is dead. Campus diversity doesn’t have to be.

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The Supreme Court has ended affirmative action, meaning colleges and universities are no longer allowed to consider race in the admissions process. For opinion columnist David Brooks, the decision opens the door to a rethink of the university’s entire admissions process, which he says has historically favored students from wealthy backgrounds.

Listen to the story in the audio player below. A full transcript follows.

David Brooks: I’m David Brooks. I’m a columnist for The New York Times. I write about politics. I write about sociology. I write about anything that strikes me as interesting that week.

We’ve been debating affirmative action since I wore diapers, and the Supreme Court has dug deeper into the issue, and now it’s essentially ruled to eliminate racial affiliation in college admissions.

Overall, I’m probably sad that affirmative action is disappearing, but I’m hopeful that we can take advantage of this moment, whether we’re angry about it or happy about it, to think in a much bigger way about who’s in what schools has to come. I think it’s time we take a step back and look at the whole system and really develop a system that is fair to students from all backgrounds.

So in the 1950s, Harvard University decided they wouldn’t just accept the sons of the elite. They had to accept the people who were frankly smarter and came from a wider section of American society. So they decided, we’re going to take GPA a lot more seriously, and we’re going to take the SAT test a lot more seriously, and anyone can join as long as they’re eligible.

A few decades later, they are not yet rid of the elite; they just traded one elite for another elite. Harvard and other schools have spent the past 50 or 60 years making a ruthless battle to get in. And if you grew up in an upper-middle-class home and your parents invested tens of thousands of dollars in your upbringing, you just have an edge over kids whose parents can’t afford to make those kinds of investments.

So we’ve ended up with a system where rich kids dominate elite schools. A 2017 study by an economist, Raj Chetty, found that students from families in the top 1 percent of earners were 77 times more likely to be accepted into the Ivy League than poor students. And you have school after school after school where you have more kids from families in the top 1 percent than families in the bottom 60 percent.

So these elite places become these little islands where rich people pass their benefits on to their children. They marry each other. They invest massively in their children. Their children then attend these exclusive schools. They move to the same few metro areas. And people who don’t grow up in these kinds of resource-rich families are really left behind. We have created a caste society based on who gets into which exclusive colleges.

So I view the college admissions process through my own personal lens. Like everyone else, I wouldn’t qualify for one of the elite schools by today’s standards. I went to a public high school outside of Philadelphia. I didn’t do particularly well in high school. I didn’t graduate in the top third of my class. My GPA was probably around 3.0. And yet the University of Chicago, which I eventually went to, admitted 70 percent of applicants at the time. I was lucky, and I learned to work while I was in college, and I started to get better at writing and things like that. And so I managed to have a very nice career, much more successful than I ever expected. But under the current regime I wouldn’t have made it.

As an adult, I’ve seen the college admissions process from the other end of the spectrum, from a professor’s perspective and also from a parent’s perspective. The process is not only divisive, but also does not give people a fair chance to change the trajectory of their lives later in life.

I think colleges should select students holistically. They have to look at their grades, they have to look at their test scores, but they also have to look at their resilience. For example, they should seek kindness and generosity in their lives. And then, well, we live in a class society, and so we should have a system that is kind of geared towards kids who grew up in poorer families and didn’t have the resources that the richer kids had when they grew up.

There’s a man named Richard Kahlenberg who has been arguing for decades that we need to come up with a system where a kid growing up in West Virginia or a poor area of ​​New Orleans has the opportunity to compete with a kid who grew up in Beverly Hills or Santa Monica of Manhattan. And so he built models of how to do this. These are models that schools like Harvard or the University of North Carolina can use.

And he’s found that when you factor in things like “What neighborhood did you grow up in?” “How much family wealth do you have?” you get a class with the same level or even more racial diversity by using the Kahlenberg system than under the current system. But you also have many, many, many more first-generation students whose parents didn’t go to college at all.

With affirmative action disappearing, colleges and universities are looking to a possible future where they have less diverse classrooms. And so the remaining legal way to make different campuses is to do it class by class. And it just seems to me that this moment when the Supreme Court shook up the admissions process, now is the time to do it.

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This Times Opinion piece was produced by Sophia Alvarez Boyd. It was edited by Stephanie Joyce and Allison Benedikt. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. Original music by Carole Sabouraud and Sonia Herrero. Mixes by Carole Sabouraud and Isaac Jones. Special thanks to Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski.