In the heat of the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama said something important about the role of affirmative action in college admissions that should give pause to those who favor the status quo.
“I think that my daughters should probably be treated by any admissions officer as folks who are pretty advantaged,” Obama explained. “I think that we should take into account white kids who have been disadvantaged and have grown up in poverty and shown themselves to have what it takes to succeed.”
While it is not surprising that a candidate who desired to be seen as “post-racial” would say this, elite academia has largely failed to even consider Obama’s suggestion. Affirmative action in college admissions is a valuable concept, but America has outlived the use of a race-based system and its universities should develop programs that will aid students who have limited resources and opportunities in a race-blind fashion.
An exhaustive study conducted by Princeton sociologists Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford examined data from 10 selective colleges over a decade-long period to see how race and inequality affected the admissions process. Their findings show that preference is given to minority groups regardless of socioeconomic status at the expense of lower-income white and Asian applicants.
The authors of this study then constructed a model in which affirmative action for black and Hispanic applicants is eliminated and preference is given to low- and working-class students regardless of race. The results indicate that the percentage of accepted minority applicants from privileged families would decrease by 4.4 percent while the acceptance rate would increase by 8.5 percent for lower-class white or Asian candidates. These figures are startling in their size and demonstrate that affirmative action policies are often used as a lift for minority students who have enviable resources at their disposal. Furthermore, lower-income white and Asian students are actually placed at a disadvantage compared with their peers from a higher socioeconomic status because universities are inclined to reach for minority enrollment targets. (jillszeder.com) New York Times columnist Ross Douthat recently wrote that “an upper-middle-class white applicant was three times more likely to be admitted than a lower-class white with similar qualifications.”
These statistics explain a phenomenon that is probably already apparent to Georgetown students and our peers at selective universities: there is a startling lack of socioeconomic diversity at Georgetown and similar schools. Georgetown’s 2007 Intellectual Life Report concluded that socioeconomic diversity actually decreased from 1996 to 2007. Changing the emphasis from race-based affirmative action to an opportunity-based program would go a long way toward alleviating this problem. Georgetown has a reduced ability to provide competitive financial aid packages compared to peer schools, so one can only hope that the high-profile 1789 Scholarship campaign will address this critical failing of the University. A paradigm shift regarding the attitude of admissions counselors and an increased willingness to use resources to attract top applicants from economically disadvantaged backgrounds are needed to improve the current socioeconomic situation here at Georgetown.
Purely class-based affirmative action is a radical proposition and would represent a significant change from the policy that has existed at selective universities for the past four decades. However, class-based affirmative action captures the American ideal of equality of opportunity—one that is very poorly served by the advancement of racial preference. Instead, we should strive to achieve Thomas Jefferson’s conception of a natural aristocracy, driven by talent and intellect as opposed to physical characteristics. Changing this dynamic in the admissions process would not only assist those who are placed at a disadvantage by the status quo, but also lead to better social and educational experience for Georgetown students.
