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Social class is not just about race

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The University of Virginia, one of the top public universities in the country, enrolls a remarkably affluent group of students: Less than 15 percent of recent students at UVA come from families with incomes low enough to qualify for Pell Grants, the Largest Federal Financial Aid Program.

The same goes for some other public universities, including Auburn, Georgia Tech, and William & Mary. It is also the case with a larger group of elite private colleges, including Bates, Brown, Georgetown, Oberlin, Tulane, and Wake Forest. The skew is so extreme at some colleges that more students come from the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from the entire bottom 60 percent, found an academic study.

It is worth remembering that this pattern has persisted despite affirmative action. Nearly every college with an affluent enrollment has historically used a race-based admissions policy. Those policies often succeeded in producing racial diversity without producing as much economic diversity.

After the Supreme Court ruling last week prohibiting race-based affirmative action, much of the commentary has focused on how admissions officers might use economic data, such as household income or wealth, to ensure lasting racial diversity. And whether they figure out how to do that is important (like me previously covered).

But racial diversity is not the only diversity that matters. Economic diversity matters in itself: The lack of lower-income students at many elite colleges is a sign that educational opportunities are limited for Americans of all races. In other words, economic factors such as household wealth are valuable not only because they are a potential measure of race; they are also a telling measure of disadvantage in their own right.

Like colleges renew their admission policy to respond to the court’s decision, there are two different questions worth asking: Can the new system comply also as the old one in enrolling black, Hispanic and Indigenous students? And can it better when enrolling lower-income students? So far, public discourse has tended to ignore that second question.

Creating more economically diverse selective campuses is both difficult and possible.

It is difficult because almost every aspect of the admissions system favors affluent applicants. They go to better secondary schools. With their theses they receive help from their highly educated parents. They know how to use the system by choosing character-building extracurricular activities and taking standardized tests multiple times. In many cases — if the applicants are athletes or the children of alumni, donors, or faculty members — they benefit from their own version of affirmative action.

Nevertheless, some colleges have recently shown that it is possible to enroll and graduate more middle and low income students.

These new diverse colleges include several with multi-billion dollar endowments (such as amherstHarvard, Princeton, Swarthmore and Yale). The list also includes colleges with fewer resources, such as Franklin & Marshallmacalaster, Vassar and Wooster – who had to make tough choices to find the money to increase their scholarship budget. Crucially, these campuses have not sacrificed one form of diversity for another: they also tend to be racially diverse.

Admissions officers at such colleges have recognized that talented students from humble backgrounds don’t usually look as polished. Their essays are perhaps less impressive – perhaps because they are less edited by adults. The college student’s summer activity may have been a job in her own impoverished neighborhood—rather than a social justice trip to an impoverished area abroad.

Many of these students have tremendous promise. By admitting them, an elite school can change the trajectories of entire families. In contrast, a university dominated by affluent students fails to serve as the engine of opportunity it could be.

I am not suggesting that economic diversity is an adequate substitute for racial diversity. The United States has a specific history of racial discrimination, especially against Black and Native Americans, which continues to limit opportunities for today’s teens. The Supreme Court ruling banning affirmative discrimination based on race sometimes seemed to wish away this history, assuming that the country had left racism behind. In reality, students of color, at every income level, face challenges that white students do not.

But many of the people who run elite colleges have had their own blind spot in recent decades. They have often excluded class from their definition of diversity. They enrolled students of every race and religion, from every continent and region of America, without much concern for the economic privilege many of those students shared.

Now that colleges are legally required to change their approach, they have a new opportunity to broaden their definition of diversity.

  • The Supreme Court decisions on affirmative action and student debt have given Democrats a chance to talk about class and improve their elitist image. Jonathan Weisman of The Times asks, “Will the party run?”

  • “Affirmative action, in my opinion, was doomed,” Jay Caspian Kang writes in The New Yorkerfocusing on how the system treated Asian Americans.

  • This could be an opportunity to improve university admissions, Times Opinion writes. Seven experts tell us how they would review the system.

mustard belt: Reigning champions Joey Chestnut and Miki Sudo each defended their Nathan’s hot dog eating contest yesterday. The athletic share the videos.

Save music history: In the mid-2000s, before Spotify dominated the online music industry, mixtape websites like DatPiff were thriving, giving musicians an easy way to release their songs for free. Much of their content fell into a legal gray area; signed artists published songs without their label’s approval, and tracks often used unlicensed samples. While those loose lines once aided hip-hop creativity, writes Brian Josephs in The Times, they are now complicates the effort to preserve the sites’ archives.

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