The case for class-based affirmative action

ELITE COLLEGES OFTEN trumpet their efforts to recruit low-income students -- the trips to the inner-city schools, the special summer programs, the generous aid packages. Last year, Harvard made headlines when it announced that families earning less than $40,000 would no longer have to contribute any money toward their children's education. This March, after student protests, Yale announced that it was following suit with a similar policy.

But how badly do top colleges really want students from "the other half"? According to a new study headed by former Princeton president William G. Bowen, not nearly as badly as they want alumni kids, athletes, and minority students.

In "Equity and Excellence in American Higher Education" (Virginia), Bowen, president of the Mellon Foundation since 1988 (and unofficial nagging conscience of higher education), along with coauthors Martin A. Kurzweil (a Harvard Law student) and Eugene M. Tobin (former president of Hamilton College), demonstrates that poor students are treated exactly like wealthy prep-schooled students by the admissions office. At the 19 selective institutions the authors studied -- ranging from five Ivy League schools to smaller colleges like Bowdoin and Williams and a few "public Ivies" like the University of Virginia -- a poor student with an SAT score of 1200 (under the old scoring system) had almost precisely the same chance of admission as the son of a neurosurgeon with the same score. Many college leaders don't even realize that's the case, the authors say.

In contrast, recruited athletes had, on average, a 30 percentage-point admissions advantage (so a student whose grades otherwise gave him a 20 percent chance of getting in leapt up to 50-50 if he'd caught a coach's eye). Black and Latino students had a 28 percentage-point advantage, while legacy students got a 20 percentage-point break. For poor students (who, incidentally, graduate from selective colleges at the same rate as the student body as a whole): nada.

Since poor students are already underrepresented in the applicant pool -- there are six times as many students from the top quartile who get a 1200 on their SAT's as in the bottom quartile - the result is campuses that don't look much like America, class-wise.

Students from families in the lowest quartile of earnings -- roughly $34,500 or less today - now make up only 9 percent of the students admitted at the elite colleges in the Bowen study. That's higher than in the past, but still an embarrassment to a meritocratic society, the authors say. Perhaps even more alarmingly, the percentage of admissions slots going to students in the top income quartile (family income of $101,000 or higher today) has risen from 39 to 50 percent since 1976. (At Harvard, where the annual bill comes to $42,500, roughly half of the students come from families who earn too much to qualify for need-based grant assistance from the university.)

To avoid a slow slide back to the aristocratic collegiate world captured in F. Scott Fitzgerald's "This Side of Paradise," Bowen and his coauthors propose placing a "thumb on the scale": If elite colleges simply gave students from families earning less than $33,000 or so the same admissions advantage given to alumni kids, the proportion of poor students at elite colleges would rise to something like 17 percent. The colleges would become more like the engines of opportunity that they see when they look in the mirror -- rather than the redoubts of privilege the statistics reveal.

Bowen and his colleagues don't propose class-based affirmative action as a replacement for race-based measures, as others have. Do that, their data shows, and black and Latino enrollment at elite colleges would drop by half. There are just too many poor white students. Instead, they propose economic affirmative action as an add-on.

Nearly everyone wants to see more poor kids go to college, but some balk at adding yet another preferred category to the admissions mix. At a recent panel discussion at the Brookings Institution in Washington, Amy Gutmann, the president of the University of Pennsylvania, cautioned: "Don't diss the middle class." Middle-income students, she pointed out, are nearly as underrepresented on elite college campuses as are the poor. It would be "wrong morally and wrong politically" to give families making $25,000 an admissions advantage over those making, say, $50,000, who are hardly vacationing-on-the-Vineyard types.

Gutmann placed her faith in broader recruitment and in efforts to improve aid for the poor and middle class. And long term, she said, the only answer is broadening the admissions pool by improving public schools.

Bowen's case for a thumb on the scale for low-income applicants, however, looks stronger when you consider who is already getting a boost: athletes (who, Bowen has shown in earlier books like "The Game of Life," get lower grades and are less intellectually engaged than their peers) and alumni kids (already among the most privileged applicants).

To avoid a middle-class squeeze, Bowen, at Brookings, proposed taking slots away from recruited athletes and awarding them in "areas where students perform better, and where the social utility is higher" -- i.e., to the poor. But so far no college has dared to provoke its check-writing alumni by cutting back either on jocks or on alumni kids -- or dared to risk its U.S. News ranking by turning away substantial numbers of affluent super-achievers in favor of disadvantaged kids with lower test scores. There are some things, it seems, only a retired college president can say.

Christopher Shea’s column appears in Ideas biweekly. Email critical.faculties@verizon.net.