Poverty Preferences

Walter Benn Michaels, formerly of Berkeley but lately of the University of Illinios, Chicago, is a smart guy. I’ve read some of his work with interest and profit. An essay he wrote in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine on “Diversity’s False Solace” reveals that he’s still smart, but it also reveals that smart can only take you so far.

Michaels has discovered (perhaps he always knew) that affirmative action, i.e., racial preference, is not what its defenders pretend.

In the end, we like policies like affirmative action not so much because they solve the problem of racism but because they tell us that racism is the problem we need to solve. And the reason we like the problem of racism is that solving it just requires us to give up our prejudices, whereas solving the problem of economic inequality might require something more — it might require us to give up our money. It’s not surprising that universities of the upper middle class should want their students to feel comfortable. What is surprising is that diversity should have become the hallmark of liberalism.

As evidenced by this essay, and others in the news lately, racial preference is becoming passé. The New Thing is to favor poverty preference. Thus William Bowen, the former president of Princeton whose The Shape of The River did so much to muddy the waters of the racial preference debate (see the lengthy review by Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom in the June 1999 UCLA Law Review), has now turned his attention from race to class. As an article about him in today’s Washington Post notes,

Bowen is calling upon selective colleges to open their doors to more students whose parents are poor or did not attend college by giving them the same extra consideration granted to minorities or children of alumni.

If the problem is poverty, you might think the solution would be more money, but that’s not primarily what Bowen is after. He

argues that financial aid does not go far enough. In his study of admissions at 19 competitive colleges, he found that students from underprivileged backgrounds who are accepted already choose to enroll at about the same rate as others, suggesting they’re not deterred by costs.

Yet their overall numbers remain tiny: 3.1 percent of students in the 1995 entering class at the 19 schools were from lower-income families in which neither parent had attended college. So, Bowen says, colleges should put “a thumb on the scale” for such students’ applications.

Of course, a “thumb on the scale” for these students amounts to a thumb in the eye for those middle class students with stronger credentials who are excluded to make room for them. And since Bowen does not want to reduce racial preferences in any way, it is a thumb that has a disparate impact on the eyes of middle class students who are white.

Michaels has jumped on this same, increasingly fashionable bandwagon. Now that racial preferences are safe, it is permissible to pooh-pooh them, and Michaels does.

When student and faculty activists struggle for cultural diversity, they are in large part battling over what skin color the rich kids should have. Diversity, like gout, is a rich people’s problem. And it is also a rich people’s solution. For as long as we’re committed to thinking of difference as something that should be respected, we don’t have to worry about it as something that should be eliminated. As long as we think that our best universities are fair if they are appropriately diverse, we don’t have to worry that most people can’t go to them, while others get to do so because they’ve had the good luck to be born into relatively wealthy families. In other words, as long as the left continues to worry about diversity, the right won’t have to worry about inequality.

This argument has a nice progressive aura about it, but there’s something about the logic I find troubling. In precisely what kind of society could “most people” go to the Harvard’s and Yales? I assume Michaels would say that he is not opposed to the notion of selectivity itself, only to the existence of any association between “merit” (I’m putting the quotes in for him) and wealth. But in what sort of society would there be no such association? One in which everyone’s wealth and assets are the same?

And even in the society we have, what exactly is the connection between wealth and academic privilege? Michaels doesn’t explain, but he seems to assume quite a lot.

If the income distribution at Harvard were made to look like the income distribution of the United States, some 57 percent of the displaced students would be rich, and most of them would be white. It’s no wonder that many rich white kids and their parents seem to like diversity. Race-based affirmative action, from this standpoint, is a kind of collective bribe rich people pay themselves for ignoring economic inequality. The fact (and it is a fact) that it doesn’t help to be white to get into Harvard replaces the much more fundamental fact that it does help to be rich and that it’s virtually essential not to be poor.

In what precise way does it “help to be rich”? I assume Michaels would agree that rich applicants are not given a “thumb on the scale” the way minority applicants are. Perhaps he means only that it helps to be rich if you want to go to Harvard in the same way that it helps to be black if you want to play professional basketball. On the other hand, I’m not sure that either of these statements makes much sense. What really seems to help is how well you play the particular game at issue.

It is certainly not fair if inherited advantage means that certain groups of people have a greater chance to develop certain skills than others, but the solution to that problem, insofar as it is a problem, remains elusive. Thumbs on the admissions scales at some selective colleges would seem to be woefully insufficient (as well as being itself unfair to those excluded by the application of double standards), while the curtailment of freedom necessary to produce absolute equality of wealth over generations has already been tried in a few societies with a notable lack of success.

Say What? (5)

  1. fenster moop April 13, 2004 at 5:45 pm | | Reply

    Good post. I agree that using the Harvards of the world as explicit vehicles to address income inequality is not a good idea. It also shows a certain academic conceit: Michaels is in academia, and perhaps assumes that his institutional home is the right vehicle for getting the entire society to be what he wants it to be.

    But there is a risk to too much “thinking like a state”, just as there is a genius in the very diversity of the very American mix of public and private higher education.

    Admittedly, there’s a good fight to be had about what has to happen to, say, reduce the black-white test gap. But dumbing down academic standards does not seem to be a good way to approach the problem. Better to go right at it, via K-12 reform and challenging the anti-intellectual assumptions of the less priveleged.

    I’ve posted on this, too, at fenstermoop.blogspot.com.

    F.

  2. Gyp April 13, 2004 at 8:44 pm | | Reply

    “Better to go right at it, via K-12 reform . . . ”

    Exactly.

    What it seems to me they’re doing is letting poor students in because they’re poor. If they have the right creditials, then perhaps helping them pay for college is a good thing, but it seems to me adding points like they do for certain races doesn’t make sense.

    If they think the poor wouldn’t have had equal opportunities to learn at a younger age, why not change the public school systems so they do?

  3. aaron April 17, 2004 at 1:45 am | | Reply

    It’s not simply an issue of access to education. It’s the cultural differences. Many less affluent people simply aren’t aware of the opportunities available to them. Many are turned off by the elitist culture of acedamia. Many don’t think they’ll be accepted and don’t try. Many don’t understand being judged by fashion, regional background, social background, or academic politics and wouldn’t consider subjecting themselves to that.

  4. A_Reader April 19, 2004 at 6:25 pm | | Reply

    But it also seems quite true that the wealthy are far more likely to receive better academic preparation than poor or even lower-moderate middle class kids (i.e., by attending private primary and secondary schools or by living in wealthier public school districts–like Radnor for example). These kids are being groomed for the elite/Ivy schools–and although not every rich kid gets into Harvard, this grooming for achievement comes about because their economic situation fosters it.

    This doesn’t mean that the wealthy kids at Ivy U. aren’t smart or meritorious–they are. But they’ve also received all the advantages that allowed them to develop to be meritorious. And, of course, wealthy families are more likely to be able to afford private colleges AND more likely to contribute gift money to the college/university (which is in no small part why they are “better” candidates for admissions).

    I’m not sure why it might be considered *unfair* to admit to an elite university a poor student from Chester High School who manages to get, say, 1300 on her SATs, receive good grades and is involved in sports and school despite living in poverty, attending a terrible high school, etc., over a rich, privileged kid from Radnor High who gets 1400 on her SATs, good grades, etc., but did it in an environment conducive to those results.

    Certainly and obviously, you shouldn’t *penalize* someone for being wealthy, but it seems a strong argument could be made that, all things being equal, the Chester student demonstrates more potential than the Radnor student and, therefore, merits admission.

    Anyway, I think class/economic background is a better thing to weigh than race (and will many times coincide). One shouldn’t get admitted just because they are poor–but if you are trying to reduce an applicant pool of 9-10 thousand down to 1.5-2 thousand, how do you do it? Once you weed out the obvious non-qualifiers, what criteria do you use? If you now have 5 thousand applications that are all basical the same (ie, high SATs, good grades, etc), how do you cut that in half? Well, one thing I’d look at is what kind of obstacles or hurdles did an applicant have to overcome. This surely speaks to not only ability, but drive and maturity of the applicant. So class background can weigh in at this stage.

    On the other hand, all Harvard needs to do to meet race-based affirmitive action is find the rich African-American girl from Radnor whose parents are doctors and admit her thereby meeting their “quotas” but privileging a student who likely didn’t need the leg up in the first place.

    The other thing we need to stop doing is perpetuating this extreme hierarchy between the “elite/ivy” colleges and “non-elite” or public colleges. There is NO shame in attending Penn State instead of Penn, it is not a sign of failure and you do not necessarily get an inferior education (that is purely up to the student). You just don’t get the “status” that the Ivy name grants.

  5. Michael McCanles April 20, 2004 at 8:02 pm | | Reply

    I tried to read Benn Michaels’ essay and found its ironies too coy to entice me to unravel them.

    Whatever he’s getting at, there’s no question as to what the presidents of Harvard and Princeton were getting at (e.g.) in writing The Course of the River, which is that elite institutions should spread the charisma and cache of getting their degrees around to more people than those who have white skins. IOW, generally ignored in the whole AffAct debate is that “going in for” diversity is really an elaborate, and elaborately public display of self-congratulation. XYZ Valley Community College don’t do affirmative action.

    Put still another way, Ivy-leage schools are in the business of commodifying the prestige that they have for being prestigious, saying in effect that we exist to give our customers, i.e., students, what very few other schools can give them, namely the head-start of having an Ivy-League degree.

    In short, affirmative action is a form of snobbism masking behind of a facade of egalitarianism.

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