Something important has been missing from the affirmative action debate ever since three white students filed suit against the University of Michigan in 1997 -- something that is dreadfully obvious yet has been ignored consistently by both sides. In short, the heated battle over the proper role of race in college admissions policies has left economically disadvantaged students to pick up the pieces and move on.
Americans recognize the importance of higher education. For many, it serves as the key to a professional career, provides access to crucial resources and ultimately facilitates class mobility. This is why we are debating affirmative action in the first place -- people disagree on how to allocate limited resources. Although almost any high school graduate who wants to attend college can do so, not everyone can attend a highly selective university. Students who attend these institutions graduate with a competitive advantage that lower-tier schools simply cannot offer.
If higher education is truly to become the "great equalizer" as it is often referred to, then economic affirmative action policies must supplant the current system of racial preferences. For decades now, educators and lawmakers have touted affirmative action as serving disadvantaged minorities. The numbers, however, suggest otherwise.
In an April brief written for the Century Foundation -- a liberal think tank based in New York -- Richard Kahlenberg cites a book written by two former Ivy League presidents. The two researchers found that "86 percent of blacks who enrolled in the 28 selective universities they studied were middle class or upper-middle class" (Kahlenberg's brief may be found at http://www.tcf.org).
This implies racial preferences are not a good proxy for economic disadvantage. Despite what supporters of affirmative action say, race-based admissions as they are currently implemented do nothing to help poor minorities.
A strictly "merit-based" admissions policy, the approach favored by the Bush administration, also excludes low-income students. Under such a policy, students are admitted based only on their class rank and SAT scores -- depriving economically disadvantaged students of the merit they deserve.
For example, should a wealthy high school student with a 3.5 GPA and a 1250 SAT score be treated the same as a poor student with a similar academic record? Certainly, the poor student with fewer advantages in life would seem more worthy of a seat at a top university.
Out of the 170,000 students admitted to the top 10 percent of U.S. schools each year, only 9 percent of the students come from the lower half of the economic spectrum. Only 17 percent come from the second-highest quartile, and a whopping 74 percent come from the highest quartile.
The reason for the disparity: Poor students who do well academically tend to enroll in four-year colleges at only half the rate of their academically matched, but wealthy peers -- 44 percent versus 80 percent. But these statistics, which appeared in a report issued by the Century Foundation on March 31 ("Socioeconomic Status, Race/Ethnicity, and Selective College Admissions," http://www.tcf.org), do not necessarily show that U.S. schools actively discriminate against low-income students.
Perhaps the 31 percent of poor yet academically promising students who never attend college do so because they must work to support their families or their families discourage them from continuing their education. Unfortunately, the data required to draw definitive conclusions have not been collected.
It is reasonable to assume, however, that a sizable proportion of poor, qualified high school graduates never make it into top-notch universities because their wealthy counterparts are given preference. After all, universities make money off of wealthy students, not poor students.
But what if students who have overcome economic adversity were given some sort of advantage in college admissions? This policy would be far more egalitarian than either of the options currently being debated in the Supreme Court. Economic affirmative action should be implemented as a viable, fair alternative to race-based or strictly merit-based admissions policies.
Opponents of economic affirmative action claim that minority enrollment would drop because whites make up the largest share of the nation's poor, and poor whites typically outperform their minority counterparts on standardized tests.
But the authors of the socioeconomic status report found that under an economic affirmative action regime, minority enrollment -- defined in the study as enrollment of blacks and Hispanics -- would drop from 12 percent of all college students to 10 percent. The benefit of boosting the enrollment of low-income students, regardless of their race, outweighs the 2 percent drop in overall minority enrollment. In their simulation, the authors calculated that the proportion of admitted students from the bottom half of the economic ladder would jump from 9 percent to 38 percent.
Furthermore, it wouldn't be unreasonable to expand the definition of "minority" to include economically disadvantaged students. Low-income students are as much a minority in higher education as blacks or Hispanics. By this logic, any claim that economic affirmative action hurts minorities is categorically false.
Unfortunately, economic affirmative action does not pay for itself, at least in fiscal terms. In accepting more low-income students, universities would have to allocate more money for tuition subsidies or else raise tuition and pass on the additional cost to wealthier students. At the very least, schools with sizable endowments should use their wealth to subsidize low-income students.
The Supreme Court is expected to take until July to make a ruling on the University of Michigan case. In the meantime, instead of holding their collective breath, U.S. colleges and universities would do well to consider seriously the merits of economic affirmative action.
(Sam Bresnahan's column appears Tuesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at sbresnahan@cavalierdaily.com.)
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