Racial Discrimination In Financial Aid

In the course of replying to a charge of “ugly racism evident in the current financial aid system,” Richard Vedder of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity provides some interesting data, and analysis:

In 2004, for full-year students with one institutional affiliation who are dependents, the average grant made to whites was $3,375, while the average grant to blacks was $5,321, nearly 58 percent more. Total financial aid for whites was $7,259, compared with the 42 percent higher figure of $10,325 for blacks.

You might logically say that whites have higher incomes than blacks, so if aid is need-based, more should go to blacks. I agree. However, if one confines the analysis to only low income students (in the bottom one-fourth of the income distribution), we see the average black student still receives almost $2,000 (21-22 percent) more aid than the average white. Controlling for income, blacks are significantly favored relative to whites –perhaps reverse racism, if you will.

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If one wanted to build a case of discriminatory treatment based on race, it is interesting to compare blacks and Hispanics. Average parental income is similar for the two groups (Hispanic income is less than four percent higher), but blacks receive on average more than 28 percent larger average grants….

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  1. Chetly Zarko November 2, 2006 at 1:57 pm | | Reply

    That’s fertile ground for the next version of Grutter. Even O’Connor said you can’t have different preferences for different groups that are “in” the preferred categories – that is, you can’t discriminate among hispanics and blacks if both are preferred.

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