Robert VerBruggen Will Universities Embrace Class-Based Preferences? A new book makes the case for considering applicants’ socioeconomic backgrounds.
Class Matters: The Fight to Get Beyond Race Preferences, Reduce Inequality, and Build Real Diversity at America’s Colleges, by Richard Kahlenberg (PublicAffairs, 384 pp., $26.99)
Richard Kahlenberg is an old-school liberal, committed to narrowing the gap between rich and poor. He’s also one of the leading critics of racial preferences in college admissions, having served as an expert witness for the plaintiffs in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the Supreme Court case that effectively ended the practice. In his new book, Class Matters, Kahlenberg lays out the connection between these commitments.
Notably, Kahlenberg’s opposition to affirmative action doesn’t seem to be rooted in instinct or ideology. His concerns are practical. First, racial preferences divide the working class, making political solidarity harder to achieve. More significantly, the gatekeepers at selective colleges seem far more invested in race than in class—eliminating racial preferences, he argues, might finally force them to focus on economic disadvantage.
Citing studies of admissions data, Kahlenberg explains that, prior to Students for Fair Admissions, preferences for black applicants tended to be substantial, while those for lower-income students were minimal or nonexistent. Because wealthier students generally have stronger academic credentials—and can afford steep tuition—elite colleges became havens for a multiracial upper class, doing little to dismantle class barriers. Race-based affirmative action let these institutions achieve the aesthetic diversity they sought without making serious investments in financial aid.
Over decades of advocacy, Kahlenberg hoped he might persuade colleges to take class more seriously—perhaps by pairing racial preferences with a meaningful boost for the economically disadvantaged. But those efforts never gained traction. Eventually, he concluded that the only way to secure substantial class-based preferences was to eliminate race-based ones. If colleges could no longer consider race directly, they might turn to class as a proxy—admitting poorer students of all backgrounds, even if the real aim remained maintaining minority enrollment.
He accomplished Step 1 of that plan. Now, we’ll see how Step 2 goes—and Kahlenberg occupies an interesting position as this process plays out.
Many conservatives opposed to affirmative action concede that universities should give modest preferences to applicants who have overcome hardships. But most are not troubled if those class-based preferences yield fewer black and Hispanic enrollees than would have been admitted under race-based affirmative action.
Kahlenberg, by contrast, has spent years arguing that class-based preferences can sustain the level of racial diversity once achieved through affirmative action. While his approach is far preferable to one that explicitly favors some racial groups over others, it comes with difficult tradeoffs.
As Kahlenberg points out, the simplest form of class-based admissions—boosting applicants based on parental income—can’t fully replicate the minority enrollment levels produced by affirmative action. A significant black–white gap in test scores, for example, persists even among students from families with similar incomes.
One popular alternative gained traction in states that banned affirmative action before the Supreme Court did: granting automatic admission to the top 10 percent (or another set proportion) of each high school’s graduating class. This approach leverages existing racial and class segregation at the high school level to produce a diverse campus. It also disrupts the tendency of colleges to admit heavily from wealthy “feeder” schools while overlooking high-achieving students elsewhere. Sometimes, “percent plan” enrollees even outperform their peers in college.
While these initiatives enjoy bipartisan support, they come with some downsides. As my colleague Renu Mukherjee notes in a recent Manhattan Institute brief, percent plans are not fully meritocratic, as students from low-performing schools can gain admission with weaker academic records than would be competitive elsewhere. (Standardized tests, on the other hand, assess aptitude on a common scale, and predict college performance well across class lines.) There’s also significant debate over whether percent plans achieve the levels of racial diversity their advocates claim.
At the elite level, the percent-plan discussion is largely moot—these schools have too few slots to admit a set share from every high school. For such institutions, Kahlenberg advocates a multifaceted approach that considers not only parental income but also family structure, household wealth, and the poverty levels of an applicant’s neighborhood and high school.
While this method offers a more complete picture of class disadvantage, there’s a key distinction between using these factors in good faith and using them to engineer a predetermined racial outcome. Colleges are clearly committed to the latter. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling, it remains to be seen how overt schools will be in deploying “race-neutral” strategies to achieve racial goals. But as Kahlenberg notes, the courts may give them considerable leeway.
Legalities aside, Kahlenberg’s proposed admissions policies entail serious tradeoffs, as demonstrated by a simulation that he developed during SFFA. Kahlenberg modeled what would happen if Harvard granted large preferences based on an applicant’s socioeconomic disadvantages as measured by several factors, including whether he was a first-generation college student and the education level of parents at his high school.
Under this model, the typical Harvard student’s SAT score would drop from the 99th to the 98th percentile. Kahlenberg presents that as a minor change—but it could also be seen as cutting the school’s selectivity in half. The resulting racial mix wouldn’t satisfy progressive advocates: the Hispanic share increased, but the black share fell by nearly a third, though Kahlenberg notes that the underlying data lack some variables (such as wealth and family structure) that the school could add to engineer its desired mix more precisely. To accommodate a 30-point increase in lower-SES students, Harvard would also need to expand financial aid significantly and eliminate preferences for legacies, the dean’s list, and children of faculty and staff. From a societal standpoint, these might be welcome reforms—but they would impose real costs on the institution.
Kahlenberg’s vision for elite colleges—heavily populated by a multiracial working class, thanks to large admissions preferences and generous financial aid—may not excite meritocracy-minded conservatives and race-obsessed leftists as much as it does Kahlenberg himself. Still, it warrants attention as universities adjust to the new legal regime. Universities may find that the socioeconomic preferences Kahlenberg advocates are less risky than defying the courts—and more politically palatable than strict meritocracy.
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