Hold your hats, folks. Before this post is done I’m likely to come out against helping poor people, thus confirming the views of some friends, and many more former friends, that I’ve become a raving reactionary. On the way to that dastardly destination, however, I have to take a small detour through the swamp of “economic diversity,” the view that affirmative action should be based on class instead of (or at least in addition to) race.
Richard Kahlenberg, now a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, has made a career of advancing this argument, most notably in The Remedy: Class, Race, and Affirmative Action (Basic Books, 1996, now out of print but available). As I recall his argument there (and I have not checked my memory for this post; I’m upstairs and the book is in the basement), his argument was grounded in a progressive conception of fairness and compensation for past wrongs as well as a sense that valuable national talents were not being tapped. I don’t recall any “diversity” justification at all, though my memory’s not what it used to be. But just as the overall justification for racial preference has largely abandoned compensation (at least in court) and switched to the judicially-approved “diversity” rationale, so too has Kahlenberg’s argument, as demonstrated by a current article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Toward Affirmative Action for Economic Diversity.”
This article is devoted to summarizing the findings of a new book he’s edited, America’s Untapped Resource: Low-Income Students in Higher Education. It, and he, make a good case for the “underrepresentation” of poor students in elite colleges. An example:
Using data from the top 146 colleges, representing the most selective 10 percent of four-year colleges as defined by Barron’s Profiles of American Colleges, the researchers found that students in the highest economic quartile take up 74 percent of the available slots, while students in the bottom quartile fill just 3 percent. Economically disadvantaged students are 25 times less likely to be found on elite college campuses than economically advantaged students — and yet this phenomenon receives none of the attention or moral outrage associated with efforts to curtail racial preferences.
Most elite schools claim that they already give a break to low-income students, but Kahlenberg and his researchers argue that their research proves that is not the case.
If low-income students routinely received a break in admissions, as many colleges suggest, we would expect to see them overrepresented compared with their academic records. Racial preferences, for example, increase the proportion of black and Latino students at the nation’s top colleges from 4 percent, under a strict system of admissions based on grades and test scores, to 12 percent, according to Carnevale and Rose. But they found that the representation of low-income and working-class students today is actually slightly lower, not higher, than if grades and test scores were the sole basis for admissions.
Kahlenberg cites numerous polls indicating that strong majorities of Americans oppose racial preferences but support preferences for low-income students, but the nub of his new argument boils down to this:
if colleges are truly concerned about diversity, attention to race alone is insufficient. If diversity is defined broadly, to value differences in both economic and racial backgrounds — so that it values kids from trailer homes, ghettoes, and barrios, not just those minority students from affluent suburbs — economic affirmative action would add a great deal that race-based affirmative action alone does not provide.
O.K., here we go. First, if “diversity is defined broadly,” why should it be limited to race and class? Why not religion? Interest in bee-keeping? Sexual orientation (the further out, the more “diverse”)? Disability? Etc. Etc. Second, as I’ve pointed out before (such as here and here), “diversity,” on whatever basis, treats the diverse as objects for the betterment of those who receive the benefit of being exposed to them.
Kahlenberg’s argument, in short, is better as a call for more low-interest loans than it is for affirmative action for the poor. He does, however, make one good argument for differential treatment:
A 3.6 grade-point average and SAT score of 1200 surely means something more for a low-income first-generation college applicant who attended terrible schools than for a student whose parents have graduate degrees and pay for the finest private schooling.
As I’ve stated before, I have no problem with colleges choosing to favor the poor student in this example. Preferences for poverty, or athletic ability, musical talent, etc., raise no constitutional issues, which race and religion clearly do. But I wonder if even this example is as compelling as Kahlenberg thinks. It does not begin to be “holistic,” as Justice O’Connor sort of required, or rather it begins but does not go all the way. What if the rich kid came from an unhappy home, was ignored by his stressed out parent or parents, was determined to go into art history instead of the family business, while the poor kid had loving and enthusiastic support at home? Perhaps the 3.6 GPA in a tough suburban school was much harder to achieve than a 3.6 in the poor school. Or, to step on another third rail, what if the poor kid was an illegal immigrant? Class may be no better a barometer of “disadvantage” in every situation than is race.
Now let’s look at the issue of fairness. What could be more fair than extending a helping hand to those in need? Once again, not so fast. Many schools now provide full scholarships to poor students, and President Summers of Harvard recently announced a new program under which no parents earning $40,000 or less would have to contribute anything to Harvard toward their child’s education. Sounds good. But is it really fair, then, for the son or daughter of a couple, or of one parent, whose income is, say, $50,000 to leave Harvard after four years with what could easily be a debt of over $160,000?
At this point you may begin to suspect that I sound like the parent of a daughter who is about to graduate from a very expensive private college, one that steadfastly refuses to give any aid based on merit. As it happens my wife and I, mainly through luck more than skill, were able to afford her four years without hocking the family homestead, not that it was easy, but people less lucky than we are would have been unable to avoid massive debt in order to pay for those four years. Thus it does not strike me as self-evidently, indisputably fair for some students to be able to graduate debt-free while others without much more family income must assume sometimes staggering debt to pay for the same education.
As a start toward his view of what equity requires, Kahlenberg calls for Congress to appropriate about $12 billion to restore “the purchasing power of the Pell Grant to its mid-1970s level.” Maybe this is a good idea. Maybe “[t]alented poor and working-class students represent America’s untapped resource.” Maybe….
What always strikes me as odd is how the people who lament the plight of the poor student when it comes to government-funded scholarships never seem to get around to criticizing the waste and fraud that account for big chunks of tuition.
I’ve been to no less than five colleges and could probably prove each had wasted millions on non-educationally-related services alone, to say nothing of the two-person departments, useless required courses, ‘free’ student services, etc. that necessitated the 5-8% annual tuition increases we had to suffer through.
For example, when I was at USF, I ended up being forced to take several physics labs even though I’d been granted credit for the associated courses due to AP credit, spent about $600 (after state subsidies + resident rate) on fulfilling ‘multicultural’ requirements, spent another $600 re-taking math courses I’d aced in high school (and I don’t mean remedial math, here — these were third-year college equivalent courses), and then there was the ‘ethics’ course. I supposed I’d have learned a lot there if the TAs weren’t in the habit of copying site-licensed software for anyone who asked and the professors were a little bit more careful about allowing programmable calculators on tests without any math beyond basic algebra.
I don’t know if they ever dropped the theater major; I do know that when they were considering it the campus paper mentioned that about 22 people would be affected if they did. This is for a college with enrollment in the tens of thousands!
I’ve since jumped ship to UCF (for the Master’s) and I read that the student budgeting council or whatever it’s called is reconsidering the $50,000 (from student fees) party they’re throwing after a big panic over a tuition increase. Note the ‘RE’-considered: they’d approved the thing only a day or two before. Ugh ugh UGH.
John, if you look back at the NYT article and others from when this story first broke, they reported that Harvard students whose parents’ incomes fall between $40,000 and $60,000 will, under the new plan, be required to pay an average of $2,250 annually. It’s not as though under $40,000 you pay nothing, while over $40,000 you pay full tuition; there is a scale based on need. Also reported is that the average debt for a Harvard graduate this spring will be $8,800, hardly staggering, though I realize this figure may be skewed by wealthy students who were able to pay tuition in full, as well as poor students who were not required to incur any debt.
John, Kahlenberg is somewhat of a personal hero to me, since the the work I’ve amassed internally from U-Michigan archives zeroing in on almost the same conclusions (work U-M of course, hid with a passion). I only discovered his work last spring; after being pointed to it by someone who said my writings reflected his.
That said however, I don’t see Kahlenberg’s work as an endorsement of economic preferences AND race preferences; I see it as an indictment of race preferences when the only truly effective policies must be economic. I also don’t see Kahlenberg’s work as an endorsement of the creation of a vast welfare state of economic preferences; something I’m with John on in seeing the danger of. John is moe on when one suggests it favors increasing financial aid (on a more graduated scale than $40K or less and your in free, like Harvard, which means those making $41K subsidize those making $39K). However, Kahlenberg’s work is more focused on K-12 improvements for the underclass; where he postulates that breaking up communities of poor (not communities of certain skin color) and mixing them into affluent schools would help break the “culture of poverty” (which afflicts poor regardless of race). Kahlenberg’s work thus represents a ringing endorsement of vouchers; even if he doesn’t routinely advertise that part.
On the higher ed front then; I have to concur with what Reginald P. says about the chunks of “fraud and waste” built into everyone’s tuition bill. Although I support greater financial aid; I realize that merely pumping more money in will increase inefficiency and fraud and waste, and tuition inflation rates will redouble. Therefore, I’d restructure all State “subsidizes” of public universities (in Michigan, 30% of U-M’s budget comes from a direct legislative appropriate) so that they were “vouchers” directly to students for instate schools, completely portable. Financial aid federally could be the same way. Completely portable. You attend U-M for two years; realize its education isn’t worth the difference you’re paying between the voucher and the tuition; and you can decide to take the same voucher to a lesser college, save the money; and end up with a degree. Do away with the vast “financial aid offices” that every university now has. Check goes from government to student.
Not only would we reduce overhead vastly; eliminating unnecessary university payroll; but more importantly universities, now not directly receiving a check and controlling students already in their system; would have more competition for the same student dollar and be more likely to value their services at a market-like rate. They’d also look for ways to trim overhead (instead of inflate it for federal research overhead reimbursement, another system that needs marketization); cut costs; and lower prices.
But for university administrators having the fear of god placed in them based on what I just said; the overall pool of (now competitive) money I’d pony up would more than quadruple. So in the end, everyone would gain.
Chetly, As usual you make very good points. Certainly in the great scheme of things Kahlenberg and his argument are more on “our” side than not, though I do see him as at least rhetorically more tolerant of racial prefs than we. That is, I read him as being willing to add economic prefs to racial prefs if necessary, though he’d certainly prefer to drop race altogether. My main quibble is with referring to affirmative action for low-income students, which is not how I’d put it.
I teach at a small school which is able to read all applications closely and regularly gives preferences to students from loosely defined underprivileged backgrounds. The problem is that their lack of preparation for advanced college level work doesn’t miraculously disappear when they start taking college classes. It’s not their fault that they’re behind, but of course it’s not the fault of those who are simply dumb, either. Neither the school nor the student benefits from mismatching abilities with expectations, whether the goal is increasing diversity or furthering social justice or whatever.
Diversity to the MAX!
Why should only smart kids be able to go these elite universities?
After all how else could these students feel how the complicated laws and rules affect the 25% of the student population that does not finish high school?
A modest proposal:
University admissions should be based strictly on a random lottery. In this way, the pool of admitted students will truly reflect the diversity of the applicant pool. I recognize this leaves a small problem – the applicant pool may not truly reflect the diversity of the general population (of the community, state, country, etc.) The solution to that, of course, is to force everyone into the applicant pool. University admissions packages would then arrive, unsolicited, in the mail boxes of those who desperately want to attend said universities, as well as those who have never heard of the university, much less applied to it.
Overnight our Great Universities would become Truly Diverse, and, by definition, even Greater.