The University of Virginia, one of the nation’s top public universities, is home to a surprisingly wealthy group of students. Less than 15 percent of UVA’s recent undergraduates come from families with incomes low enough to qualify for Pell Grants, the largest federal financial aid program. .
The same goes for several other public universities, including Auburn University, Georgia Tech, and the College of William & Mary. This also applies to larger private elite universities such as Bates College, Brown University, Georgetown University, Oberlin College, Tulane University, and Wake Forest University. One academic study found that at some universities, the skew is so extreme that more undergraduates come from the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from the entire bottom 60 percent.
It’s worth remembering that this pattern existed despite affirmative action. Nearly all universities that attract wealthy students have historically had race-based admissions policies. These policies were often successful in creating racial diversity without creating much economic diversity.
In the wake of last week’s Supreme Court ruling banning race-based affirmative action, much of the commentary argues that admissions officers should not use economic data such as household income and assets to ensure continued racial diversity. The focus is on how to use it. And it’s whether they figure out a way to do so that matters (as explained previously).
But racial diversity is not the only type of diversity that matters. Economic diversity is important in and of itself. The lack of low-income students at many elite universities points to limited educational opportunities for Americans of all races. In other words, economic factors such as household wealth are not valuable simply because they may be a proxy for race. They are also indicators of disadvantage in their own right.
As universities revamp their admissions policies in response to the court’s decision, two different questions will be worth asking. Can we create a new system? in the same way Is it the same way we used to enroll Black, Hispanic, and Native American students?and can it be done Better What about enrolling low-income students? So far, public debate has tended to ignore that second question.
F&M model
Building more economically diverse selective campuses is both difficult and possible.
It’s difficult because nearly every aspect of the admissions system favors wealthy applicants. They go to better high schools. They receive essay guidance from their highly educated parents. They know how to work the system by choosing extracurricular activities for character development and taking standardized tests multiple times. In many cases, when applicants are children of athletes, alumni, donors or faculty, they benefit from their own version of affirmative action.
Nevertheless, some universities have recently shown that they are able to enroll and graduate more middle- and low-income students.
These newly diversified universities include some with multibillion-dollar endowments (such as Amherst College, Harvard University, Princeton University, Swarthmore College, and Yale University). The list also includes colleges with low funding, such as Franklin & Marshall College, Macalester College, Vassar College, and the College of Worcester, who are forced to make difficult choices to find money to increase their scholarship budgets. . Importantly, these campuses do not sacrifice one form of diversity for another. They also tend to be more racially diverse.
Admissions officers at these universities recognize that talented students from poor backgrounds usually appear less sophisticated. Their essays may not be all that impressive. Probably because there was less editing from adults. This student’s summer activity may have been work in her own poor community rather than a social justice trip to a poor community overseas.
Many of these students have great future potential. By admitting them, elite universities can change the trajectory of entire families. In contrast, universities with a majority of affluent students are failing to be the drivers of opportunity that they should be.
I’m not saying that economic diversity is a good substitute for racial diversity. The United States has a history of racism, particularly against Black people and Native Americans, which continues to limit opportunities for today’s teens. The Supreme Court’s decision banning race-based affirmative action seems like an attempt to erase this history, imagining that the country has moved beyond racism. Sometimes it happened. In fact, students of color at all income levels face challenges that white students do not.
But many of the people running elite universities have had their own blind spots in recent decades. They have often excluded class from their definition of diversity. They enrolled students of all races and religions from every continent and region of the United States without much concern for the economic privilege that many of their students shared.
Universities are legally required to change their approach, giving them new opportunities to broaden their definition of diversity.
related
-
The Supreme Court’s decisions on affirmative action and student debt gave Democrats an opportunity to talk about class and improve their elitist image. The Times’ Jonathan Wiseman asked, “Will the party change course?”
-
“In my view, affirmative action was doomed,” Jay Caspian Kang wrote in The New Yorker, focusing on how the system treated Asian Americans.
-
This could be an opportunity to improve college admissions, writes Times Opinion. Seven experts share how they’re overhauling their systems.
the latest news
Israeli airstrike
war in ukraine
Mustard belt: Yesterday, reigning champions Joey Chestnut and Miki Sudo each defended their titles in the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest. The Athletic shares the video.
art and ideas
Save music history: In the mid-2000s, before Spotify took over the online music industry, mixtape websites like DatPiff flourished, offering 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 label approval, and tracks often featured unlicensed samples. Brian Josephs writes that while these lax rules once helped fuel hip-hop creativity, they now complicate efforts to preserve the site’s archives.