To be clear, I don’t think I personally agree with the recent Supreme Court decision to stop affirmative action at American universities. But this article claims it would be better to focus on class. Does it make any good points? Certainly there are far more legacy admissions in the US then, say, Canada or the United Kingdom.
An excerpt from the article above (edited):
A diversity of backgrounds in elite institutions is a desirable goal. In pursuing it, though, how much violence should be done to other liberal principles—fairness, meritocracy, the treatment of people as individuals and not avatars for their group identities? At present, the size of racial preferences is large and hard to defend.
Racial preferences are not, however, the most galling thing about [elite American] universities. [Harvard] has… [a] startling 43% of white students admitted [who] enjoy some kind of non-academic admissions preference: being an athlete, the child of an alumnus, or a member of the dean’s list of special applicants (such as the offspring of powerful people or big donors).…
A cynic could argue that racial balancing works as a virtue-signalling veneer atop a grotesquely unfair system… most of Harvard’s undergraduates hailed from families in the top 10% of [income]… University presidents and administrators who preen about all their diverse classes might look at how Britain—a country of kings, queens, knights and lords—has fostered a university system that is less riven with ancestral privilege.
Unfairness in American education will not be fixed by one court ruling. But it will shock a system in need of reform. Legacy admissions should be ended… But a less socially divisive system based on income could take their place. That would do a better job of taking actual disadvantage into account.
In some ways, the question of who gets into a handful of elite universities is a distraction from the deeper causes of social immobility in America. Schooling in poorer neighbourhoods was dismal even before covid-19… too few Americans from poorer families are sufficiently well-nurtured or well-taught to be ready to apply to college.
I’m guessing there may be no good answer to this question that would satisfy a majority of reasonable people. In Canada, they tend to talk about income more. But our system has few elite universities; most of them are pretty similar in what they teach in a given offered degree.
There was an op-ed in The Guardian that takes off from a different launch point (the assumption that diversity training is a good thing) but ends up centering on a similar argument about class being a much more useful social lever than race alone.
Myself, I think either-or is a mistake. Anti-racist awareness doesn’t itself solve much of anything, but it might establish a foundational expectation for justice that can drive escalating activism. Jury’s still out on whether that will come to pass, of course.
Well, yes, I think they are so focused on race that they are blind to class.
BUT
I really think their logic is poor. I have a lot of reasons for disliking race as a category, but like it or not it exists, and we are absolutely underserving racialized minorities in our educational system, K–12 as well as higher ed., especially Black, Latino, and Native American students.
That we are also doing a disservice to other people isn’t really an excuse to stop trying to fix the enormous amount of systemic racism. Focusing on class instead of race (as opposed to alongside race) will mean that the individual and systemic racism is tacitly allowed to continue.
To me, it’s a variant on the “color-blind” argument, nice in the abstract but very problematic in the world we’re in.
They aren’t blind to class. They usual include first generation university student as one of the many preference categories.
However, and even though affirmative action schools tend to be wealthy, they want to be more wealthy, Enough class-based affirmative action to achieve the current percent of Black and Latino students would harm that by requiring a lot more financial aid.
See:
Most Black Students at Harvard Are From High-Income Families
The best approach, IMO, is not to focus on class, ethnicity, etc. Just strictly focus on academic achievement.
And yes, I understand the outcomes with such a system are not what we “want.” But if you want to change it, we need to put our resources on changing elementary and high school education, including funding for them.
I do remember having a discussion with a friend of mine about the concept of privilege. We both agreed that white privilege was a thing, but she completely floored me when she said the Obama kids were less privileged than her son. Her son who had recently joined the military, in part, so he could take advantage of the opportunities it gave him for college, something I pointed out the Obama kids didn’t have to worry about.
But then a lot of Americans like to pretend there’s no such thing as class. We’re all “middle” class.
Looking at this list, I see a few from the expensive private high school they attended went to West Point and the Air Force Academy. But just plain enlisting, of course not:
The problem with that is: We’re really talking only about the most selective schools, the ones that admit a small percentage of those that apply. As they said when I visited MIT a few years ago with my son, the issue isn’t selecting the best incoming class they can, they can form five perfect classes, academically, given the applicants they have. Then, the question is what nonacademic factors do they want to/can they take into consideration to decide who they’re actually going to admit? That’s what’s really under discussion.
I agree, fixing this starts with the very start of the educational process.
The problem is that that requires funding, which requires taxes - but anti-tax sentiment is running high. Everyone wants great education but no one wants to pay for it. Except, of course, the people complaining the public system is crap and they whine about being forced to pay tuition at a private school. Don’t they realize they’ll have to pay for education either way?
Except if you gut public education then your neighbor’s kids don’t get proper education and wind up in dead end jobs or needing constant assistance for the rest of their lives… which comes out of your taxes. Again, pay now or pay later, but at some point you pay.
I cannot speak for the UK, but I can for Canada. To the best of my knowledge, there are no legacy admissions in Canada.
They certainly didn’t apply when I went to the University of Toronto in the late 1970s/early 1980s. Despite my Dad, my Aunt, my grandparents, a great-grandparent, and possibly a great-great grandparent attending the University (we’re not sure), I got no preferential treatment. I had to work my butt off in high school to be accepted at U of T–there was no legacy preference.
Same when I went to law school at the University of Alberta. If you got in there, you did it on your own merits. Not by a legacy, though a few of my classmates could claim one. But they didn’t, they were good enough, and no matter how much their parents donated, they were just another applicant.
There were about 2500 applicants to U of A Law in my first year. The school only accepted 180. I was one such, and considered myself lucky that I got in. But if they had to consider legacies–then about 75% of my first year class would not have got in. There were that many legacies that wanted to get in.
But it doesn’t “come out of their taxes”, do they? The wealthy have the luxury of not only sending their kids to private schools, but also living in gated communities or communities that are so economically untenable for most people that they might as well be walled off. Those people who work the dead end jobs (which society still needs by the way) can go live somewhere else and commute in when needed (so long as they stay in the background).
There’s also a bit of an excluded middle between “dead end job on assistance” and MIT. Society needs a lot of different jobs between ditch digger and CEO to function properly.
I think that’s what I always find missing from these discussions about higher education and class. No one ever seems to be talking about people getting educated so they can become doctors or engineers or accountants or some other profession so they can be productive members of society. It’s always focused on getting in the elite band of top universities. To do what exactly? Land some nebulously defined job at Google or Goldman Sachs or Mckinsey that positions them to make absurd amounts of money?
American universities are blind to class because they are part of the machinery that drives the class structure in America. IMHO elite institutions are less about preparing people to do intellectually arduous jobs as they are class markers to provide an air of legitimacy to society’s wealthy elite.
How do you measure that? SATs? They only show how well the student was at taking the test, which can be a product of strategy.* Many colleges no longer use it.
Grades? Don’t those depend on the quality of the schools, which is often dependent on school funding.
*Our daughter didn’t get good SAT scores the first time she took it. We learned that she would skip a question if she wasn’t sure, since there was a penalty for wrong guesses. We told her to guess if she knew two of the answers were definitely wrong. The next time, her score improved considerably.
The “how” is already there in his answer: fund K–12 public education.
The various means that colleges use to determine admissions have some systemic racial bias, which in my opinion still needs addressing, but it’s also true that just putting our resources into a really world-class public education system would lift a lot of people.
Too impracticable. Richer school districts scream if their taxes subsidize poorer ones. Remember, in America, people want the lowest taxes possible, so it’s not politically acceptable. People also want local control of the schools, so you are comparing apples to ball bearings.
Even with that, you still have inconsistencies in SAT scores, quality of teachers, private vs. public vs. home schools, et al. There is no such thing as objective criteria.
Right, which is part and parcel of why we are not going to solve this.
People want a solution that doesn’t involve investing time, money, or effort. Sorry: that doesn’t exist. Therefore, education in America will continue to be excellent for some, terrible for others, and both race and class will be factors that indicate which is going to happen for your child.
Class differences exist in America. But they’re relatively fluid in this country. People can and do leave their birth class behind.
Race, on the other hand, is not something people leave. People live their entire lives in the race they are born in. And discrimination based on race is much more common than discrimination based on class. In America, a wealthy black person faces more prejudice than a poor white person.
So while we have problems with race discrimination and class discrimination, I feel we should focus more effort on race discrimination as it is the bigger problem.
Is it true class is very fluid in the United States? I suspect it is much more so in Canada or Australia.
My understanding is that in America, class is not as fluid as people would like to think. We imagine that one can rise from being the lowest, poorest class to great wealth but that almost never happens.