Striving for Diversity In a New Era of College Admissions

Image By: The Columbus Dispatch

For decades, affirmative action has been the crux of tensions within the college admissions system, particularly in the United States. Adequate racial diversity is still a far-fetched goal for many universities, however, the recent Supreme Court ruling against race-based affirmative action is moving us farther away from that reality. For years, scholars have constructed up race-neutral alternatives, which can now provide a foundation for productive discussions on where to shift college admissions. 

Within university discourse, affirmative action has historically been used to uplift disadvantaged groups, particularly Black communities, by favoring their chances against the highly biased admissions process. However, race-based affirmative action has repeatedly been criticized as a way to discriminate against other marginalized groups—which is a contention that will be delved into at greater depth. These ideologies have resulted in fierce tensions, forming a dichotomy between those supporting and those opposing possible race-neutral alternatives that seeks to resolve the persistent inequality that exists in higher education. 

A reality without racialized affirmative action is not brand new, as the state of California passed Proposition 209, an effective ban on this practice, in 1996. The UC schools have had nearly twenty-eight years to examine the effects that this ban had on its diversity levels, and attempt to resolve any potential misgivings with their new situation. Directly following the ban, diversity levels did, in fact, drop significantly. According to a study from UC Berkeley, the percentage of Black and Latino student enrollment plummeted by nearly 40%, which became the catalyst for a trickle effect regarding California school diversity levels. Not only were these students experiencing lower wages than their privileged counterparts upon entering the workforce fifteen years post-graduation, but new students were also unlikely to enroll without adequate representation. In order to account for this, new policies were implemented, such as the strategy of “holistic review” as well as top percent policies. Despite all these efforts, the UC school system has only witnessed a slight increase in the admission of underrepresented minority groups using top percent policies and holistic review by less than 4% and around 7% respectively. These findings by Zachary Bleemer indicate that even their race-neutral solutions have yet to tackle the solution as effectively as affirmative action policies have throughout the years. 

Examining the UC school system certainly provides the rest of the country with context on how to go about their new admissions strategies. However, with the application cycle currently entering its first round following the court’s decision, the upcoming months will be critical for examining how a lack of affirmative action will truly take root. Amid all of this, a popular solution has been supported, and picked apart, across the web: class-based affirmative action. This type of affirmative action is popular due to its ability to act as an indicator for race-related issues permeating a student’s life. One’s socioeconomic status can reveal important disadvantages that affect the opportunities one is given, their home situation, the type of community they were raised in, and also the application they submit. Debates on this solution have circulated widely, with both sides revealing valuable critiques that only emphasize the complexity around demystifying affirmative action. 

Class-based admissions have historically been defended along the basis of aligning class or income with race. Realistically, these two categories do work hand in hand with each other, as the most economically disadvantaged groups tend to also coincide with Black and Latinx communities. Naturally, it appears that a way to tackle an inherently racialized issue without  employing traditional outlets would be by turning to class-based affirmative action. Analyzing the socioeconomic status of applicants leads to the same conclusions one may reach after looking at race, such as the type of neighborhood they were raised in, amount of violent exposure throughout childhood, parental education, and more. Since race and class are so tightly interwoven, scholars on affirmative action see potential in this option, but only if implemented properly. Despite there being a lack of evidence for specific class-based alternatives within the American school system, a study published by the Economic Journal presents a model for income-based affirmative action influenced by data from college admissions in Brazil. Their system proposes using income-based quotas which divide the number of spots for each incoming class equally among economic status. In doing this, many proponents argue, not only do the individual students benefit, but their success often leads to the uplifting of their households and communities by nearly 80%. 

Many supporters of class-based affirmative action claim that class is not the only thing that is taken into account when adopting this approach, as schools who consider economic disadvantages would look beyond wealth and gather a series of factors to make their decision. It is also exceedingly obvious that as schools transition into a new method for determining applicants, many traditional practices—like legacy, children of staff members, and student athletes enrolled in niche sports—must go. Strong opposition to this view has emerged, such as lack of political support, but as writer Richard Kahlenberg emphasizes, conservative voices like Supreme Court Judges Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have championed race-neutral alternatives for decades. 

Although there has been large support shown towards class-based affirmative action, an equal amount of criticism has also been offered among discourse related to higher education. Those actively against reverting to this practice look to the representation of Black and Latinx middle-class communities. Many students from this demographic live in areas adjacent to low-income areas, resulting in similarly disadvantaged under-resourced schools and limited extracurricular opportunities. If class-based affirmative actions strategies were implemented, middle-class Black students would be competing against middle-class White students, who don’t experience the same deflated circumstances in equal frequency. Diverting from this one category does bring about complications, however, that muddle the lines between class, wealth, and race. Richard Rothstein has openly criticized Kahlenberg’s stance, claiming that when looking at low-wealth applicants, there is a greater proportion of low-weath white students than black students—yet arguing this stance is inherently flawed. There are higher proportions of white people compared to black people in many categories simply because of the significantly higher white population in the United States. In addition, scholars against wealth-dependent affirmative actions policies attempt to argue that there are other circumstances that disproportionately affect Black and Latinx individuals such as exposure to violence and less access to transportation that must be accounted for. However, these reasons are almost all dependent on a family’s wealth and socioeconomic standing, indicating how, once again, class and race are intertwined. 

It is impossible to remedy the lack of race-based affirmative action without a multitude of different strategies that target each disadvantaged area. Because of this, few other alternatives have been put forward and examined at great length. Dr. Mark Henderson at UC Davis proposed his own tool to evaluate students beyond simply looking at one’s race or income. His idea, he coined, as the socioeconomic disadvantage scale (SED), would look at a student’s life events holistically, considering matters like parental education, the type of area you were raised in, whether or not you have a job in addition to school, alongside one’s grades, test scores, essays, and interviews. The higher one scores on this scale, the more it boosts their chances at university admission. This model of adversity scores, which was designed with medical school admissions in mind, offers a collective account of a student’s upbringing that grazes on the realms of class and race. 

The two proposals above, while highly contested, give the educational space room to discuss how in a now forced color-blind world, racial diversity is something that must still be strived for. Operating in such a complex system proves that a singular solution cannot fully disassemble the multitudinous and layered issues within the decision-making process. Nevertheless, both sides present valuable arguments for and against varying types of affirmative action; and as the incoming class of 2026 enters their admissions cycle without a mandate to include underrepresented groups, the future of university admissions rests on these outcomes.