Home Our Focus Areas Roger Clegg Columns Reactions: Is It Time for Class-Based Affirmative Action?

Reactions: Is It Time for Class-Based Affirmative Action?

Wednesday, 16 December 2009

Reactions: Is It Time for Class-Based Affirmative Action? I'll assume that the reasons given by the survey respondents are true. I'll also assume that, if someone wants to go to college, it's desirable that somehow the money be found for him or her to do so (but it's better if the money is come by voluntarily rather than through taxation). Neither assumption is unassailable. It's easier to blame outside forces than personal ones, and many would question the assumption that the more people who go to college, the better. With those assumptions, however, if people are dropping out of college for financial reasons, that certainly would argue for better need-based aid for those admitted. It does not, however, argue for socioeconomic preferences in admissions. As for racial preferences: The legal justification for them today is the supposed educational benefits that obtain from student-body diversity. Naturally, preferences based on race are a more efficient way of achieving racial diversity than are preferences based on socioeconomic status. But I would much prefer that preferences be based on socioeconomic status rather than race. The educational benefits that supposedly flow from a diverse student body are rooted in differences in perspectives and experiences—not in skin color per se. Weighing socioeconomic status would provide such diversity to a similar degree as race, and without the ugliness, divisiveness, and myriad other costs of racial discrimination. In a society that is increasingly multiethnic and multiracial, we simply cannot have a legal regime that sorts people according to skin color and what country their ancestors came from, and which treats some better and others worse based on which silly little box they have checked. Final caveat, though: I doubt that the educational benefits of any sort of diversity can justify admitting students other than those most willing and able to do work at a high intellectual level.