I ask this in light of the most recent SCt decision regarding affirmative action. Would there be any objection to affording favorability for applicants from “poor” families?
To the extent American Blacks - as a group - tend to have lower income/wealth levels than whites, would this not advantage applicants of color? Asian children of recent immigrants would benefit under such a situation. Asian children of wealthy doctors and professionals - not so much.
If colleges desire a more diverse student body, I’d suspect diversifying on the basis of wealth would go quite a long way. And it doesn’t break my heart if some intelligent white child of wealth has to end up somewhere other than their first choice. They’ve got plenty of other advantages to help them overcome such misfortune.
Some selective colleges offer need-blind admissions: they accept students without regard to their ability to pay, and then offer enough financial aid to make attendance affordable.
Right. That is one thing. But if they wanted to actively increase diversity, they could offer preferential treatment to people who can show that they do not come from wealth.
Just spitballing #s - they could allocate 25% of their incoming slots to applicants whose family’s income and/or wealth are in the bottom 25% of American households. Grades, test scores, and other criteria would be relaxed for such persons.
If someone doesn’t want to disclose their family’s finances, they can just take their chances competing for the other 75% of slots.
You would have thought that I was a child of wealth based on my father’s income. I lived with my mom though who was a public school teacher and my step-dad who was a fuck up. Dad was so bitter about the divorce that he didn’t share other than what was mandated by the courts and then next to nothing after I turned 18. I was a literal starving student at times. There is no perfect solution.
You are certainly correct. There is no perfect solution. And I have not even tried to figure out how family wealth/income would be calculated.
I assume that with any attempt to redress societal inequities, there will be deserving persons who aren’t well served. Doesn’t mean attempts should not be made.
That last part is problematic. So, you want to lower the bar for poor kids? I would rather keep the bar the same for everyone, but give extra points for low-income students who are performing equally to their more financially advantaged peers. I’d rather give hard-working kids who show promise a little advantage here - to lower the bar for them seems more unfair to them and everyone else.
That sounds like a horrible idea. Letting poor people into college who are not as capable as the other students is doing them no favors at all. All you are going to do is saddle them with debt. They’ll wind up in ‘easy’ faculties with poor job prospects at graduation. And unlike rich kids, poor kids can’t afford to go to college to ‘find themselves’.
A much better idea: increase grants for poor people who score exceptionally well. Poverty shouldn’t keep you out of school if you are gifted enough to be successful at it. But lowering standards for poor people is a *terrible idea.
Here’s another good idea: Reform the bloody schools. In a country with public education, being poor should not put you at an educational disadvantage, so there is no reason to suppose that poor people will perform more poorly on tests - that is, if the schools are run properly. They aren’t. There is a vast gulf between the quality of schools in good neighborhoods and in poor ones.’
The good news is that you don’t need the Republicans to help. Democrats own education. The teachers and administrators are almost all Democrats. So rather than paper over the problems in the education system by lowering standards for kids from crappy schools, just fix the schools.
Another good idea for poor people (many who can’t afford to take four years off to study), would be to strengthen the community college, trade, and alternative education sources. This is already happening on its own - degree requirements are slowly going away in many fields, and smaller certifications are becoming preferred for some jobs. Let’s continue down that road and open up paths to good careers that don’t require sitting in classrooms for four years and being indoctrinated in subjects you don’t care about and aren’t relevant to your job.
It’s unlikely that grades need to be relaxed because the lower income students already mostly go to high schools with lower standards.
If an elite college and and an applicant from a weak high school, you do need testing to reduce chances they lack skills needed for success.
My reservation about the very popular idea of class-based admissions is that development offices will sabotage it by insisting on continuation of alumni and donor preferences that go to a wealthy cohort. Then you have the middle class being treated horribly. This may just be an issue with the most elite universities that have, from my POV, the most corrupt admissions policies.
The schools are funded plenty. You need to reform the way education is run. You need better teachers, effective administrators not married to nonsense beliefs, effective punishment for bad kids, and a return to teaching what’s important rather than a million faddish political / social issues.
Or, the public education system can simply be bypassed. We’re seeing more and more of that now.
I’ve heard many people suggest that affirmative action is not needed because everyone in America has access to an education. I do not agree with that, as the education available in poor neighborhoods is generally greatly inferior to that available in wealthier neighborhoods. So if a child attends school in a poor neighborhood in Chicago, or in rural Appalachia, they simply are not going to be able to compete with students from wealthier zip codes in terms of test scores, AP classes, extracurriculars… (I acknowledge that the top student from a lousy school will have a good GPA.)
Yes, they may face challenges succeeding at a selective college. But I am not suggesting admitting illiterate persons. Just people whose grades/scores are not quite up to the extremely high level generally required for competitive admittance. And I have spoken with many graduates of Ivies who assured me that completing the coursework was nowhere near as challenging as the efforts to get admitted.
If you have more “minority” alumni from elite colleges, they provide role models for other prospective students, they have access to power and elite networks - and can form their own, and constitute a voice to urge other changes within the institution.
And, as far as piling up debt is concerned, I am assuming that colleges would direct a greater amount of aid towards students whose very admittance reflects their relative poverty.
I acknowledge that I am not prepared to offer up a detailed proposal that everyone (any of you) will accept. But my general idea is that in many respects, wealth inequity parallels racial inequity. And I believe access to education is one likely method to address such inequities. I also believe some “preferential treatment” of the less advantaged is warranted.
As a white male born to educated middle class parents who valued education, I am well aware of the considerable advantages I have had throughout my life. It does not bother me one bit if persons who were not born with my advantages get some preferential treatment such as I propose. (Of course, I never applied to an Ivy.) If the courts outlaw racial preferences, and if institutions desire diversity, ISTM that wealth/income-based preferences might be one way to achieve such diversity.
And on average, you can expect them to have grades in college that are not as high as others. Which means not getting into grad school, taking faculties with lower standards, etc.
And when those poor people get out of school with their average undergrad degrees in a humanity, they’ll lack the connections rich people have, the resources to move away from their home to find a job, and the references to land good jobs.
When I was 20 I was an assistant manager at a Radio Shack. One of our permanent full time employees was a guy who was about 30 and had a masters in English. I made more money than he did.
Education that isn’t laser-focused on a useful career is a luxury the rich can afford. The poor cannot afford to take years from productive work to ‘find themselves’. Encouraging them to take student loans and lowering standards to get them into a college they won’t be very successful at is a good way to ruin their lives.
Did any of those study physics, engineering, math, econonomics or medicine? Or were they humanities majors? At a place like Harvard, there is a HUGE difference.
It seems to me a lot of schools already advantage poor, smart kids. I was one such kid twenty-odd years ago and I made out like a bandit. Between scholarships and Pell grants I had relatively little debt considering the cost of my university’s tuition. When I say I was poor, I don’t mean my parents couldn’t contribute much, I mean I effectively had no parents as a legally emancipated minor. I had to fill out special paperwork waiving the requirement to use my parents’ financial info.
At the time there was another big affirmative action case working its way through the courts and it involved my university, so we studied this a bit. The way they did it was not preference based on race, it was preference based on diverse experience, so if you were a white poor kid like me you got so many points tacked onto your admission score. Based on these arguments the Supreme Court ruled in my university’s favor. When I attended grad school at another university, I was still poor and received a large amount of financial aid.
Since then I’ve seen a significant push at elite universities to offer low cost or free tuition to poor students. It seems like favoring kids from low income backgrounds is even more common than it was back when I was in school. So my short answer is, this is already happening. Race is often considered as an admission advantage, but so is poverty.
It is my experience that being poor and academically talented - regardless of color - is a combination that in our current system allows a huge amount of economic mobility, more so than middle class smart kids who inevitably end up with more debt.
I’d be perfectly fine with doing away with legacy admissions. Rich kids should not have an advantage.
Preferential policies, like AA in the U.S. and caste reservations in India, do little to help the targeted groups. Does anyone seriously think that a few dozen accomplished Black teenagers going to Harvard instead of Cornell, or Brown instead of Wisconsin, does anything serious to address American racism? And once you get much past, in terms of prestige, Wisconsin, U.S. college admissions isn’t highly competitive. Normally reliable journalist James Fallows came up with this:
So undergraduate AA is an issue for a small elite, except that the non-elite hear about it.
AA-like policies can go on for a few decades without doing much good or bad, but they eventually create resentments that fuel populism. At worst, they contribute to civil war, as in Sri Lanka. At best, they are a gift to the likes of Donald Trump and Narendra Modi.
One of the advantages of affirmative action based on weath is that it is, at least in perception, new. If Biden had endorsed the Supreme Court ruling, while loudly railing against legacy preference, and insisting AA be replaced by class-based discrimination, he might have set us up for middle class resentment thirty years from now. But wealth AA would be helpful, from my POV, in getting us though the populist risks of the next eighteen months. Class-based discrimination might even create less resentment long-term since there is, in the U.S., some social mobility.
Affirmative action based on wealth might be a good idea, but it’ll never be implemented, because the colleges don’t want it. Colleges want the sort of student who will leave them big endowments in their will. In order to do that, you need to be rich. And it’s a lot easier to be rich if you start out that way.
As long as school budgets are locally based, this can’t happen. Rich neighborhoods give more money to their schools because they can, while poor neighborhoods don’t get jack shit. If you try to change the law so that the moneys are more evenly distributed, well…just remember who owns the politicians. “Reform The Schools!” is easy to say.
Deceptively easy.
I just did some googling, thinking I would find at least one U.S.state with highly equitable school spending. It was a little complicated because there are different ways of measuring equity. Some would look for equal dollars per pupil, and some would say impoverished districts need more. But I couldn’t find an exemplary state by any measure.
Funding equalization is currently being litigated in Pennsylvania:
I am all for school spending equalization. As for elite college AA being a reasonable mitigation, no.
“Humanities” encompasses such a wide range of fields it’s hard to generalize about how easy it is relative to other, more specific fields. But if I had to generalize I would say it takes a different kind of learning that is often looked down on by people incapable of thinking that way. I’ve seen easy humanities courses and I’ve seen hard ones, and the hard ones were invariably the elite university ones.
We need art, psychology, philosophy, English, foreign languages, anthropology etc just as much as we need STEM. In fact it’s the lack of humanities education that has resulted in low empathy and poor critical thinking. My hardest classes were hands-down philosophy. At any rate, I spent a great deal of college analyzing Latin American and Spanish history and surrealist South American literature - all in Spanish – and it wasn’t easy. Critically, it forced me to think about people whose voices had not been heard and the impact of US foreign policy on those people.
My undergraduate school was much harder than college admissions, so much harder I can’t imagine why anyone would find it easier. Now GRAD school admissions… That’s another matter. I imagine difficulty varies across department but I found grad school didn’t come even close to undergrad in terms of diversity of thought and academic rigor.
It’s one reason I’m sad that they are killing diversity in schools. My education was so much better at the institution most committed to a diverse student body. That diversity enhanced my education at basically every level, right down to the people I was talking to outside of class and what kinds of conversations we had. When 9/11 happened, for example, I got to experience it from so many different cultural perspectives. That college taught me how to think, and I will forever be grateful I had that experience. When people think about affirmative action they often are thinking narrowly about whether that one student will benefit unfairly. They aren’t thinking about the benefit to all students that is conferred by diversity of thought.
I was wondering if race-based admissions could be replaced by basing the admissions scores on a sort of curve. Instead of looking at absolute test scores, compare a student’s score with the average from their high school. A student from a poor school who excels would have an advantage over an equivalent student from a school of high-achievers.