By David K. Shipler
College
admissions officers who want racial diversity on campus have been playing a
cat-and-mouse game with a conservative Supreme Court that dislikes racial
preferences. The next probable step, once the Court decides the case it heard today
(Dec. 9), is to shift from race to socioeconomic class as a means to assemble a
creative variety of students. This would have pluses and minuses as a
substitute for race-based affirmative action, which the Court seems poised to
restrict severely or to strike down entirely in the current case, Fisher v. University of Texas.
Class could
be used as a proxy for race and ethnicity, given the overrepresentation of
African-American and Latino households at lower income levels in the population
as a whole. But the blacks and Latinos admitted to the most selective universities
would be very different from those who get in under current racial preferences,
large majorities of whom are middle- or upper-class, with only tiny fractions
from poor backgrounds.
“At the top
twenty law schools, 89 percent of African Americans and 63 percent of Latinos
(and even higher proportions of whites and Asians) come from the top
socioeconomic half of the population,” writes Richard D. Kahlenberg, citing a
2011 study, while only 2 percent of all law students in those schools come from
the bottom quarter. “Another study finds that the proportion of black students
at elite colleges coming from the top quartile of the socioeconomic
distribution increased from 29 percent in 1972 to 67 percent in 1992.”
