Basing affirmative action on income changes payoff

Like many Americans, Kenyatta Rowel is not entirely comfortable with racial preferences in college admissions. The University of Maryland Eastern Shore sophomore from Annapolis says he'd prefer affirmative action in higher education to be based on socioeconomic disadvantage rather than race.

Giving an admissions edge to poor college applicants is appealing because it would seem to accomplish the double goal of increasing racial diversity - because many African-Americans and Latinos are clustered low on the economic ladder - while also helping poor white students who are left behind in race-based affirmative action.

But a series of studies have arrived at what many consider a surprising conclusion: Gearing admissions preferences to poor students would reduce the numbers of blacks and Latinos at the country's top schools.

The reason? As opponents of race-based preferences like to point out, nearly all minorities at the best colleges are from the middle and upper-middle classes. Derek Bok and William G. Bowen's The Shape of the River, the definitive defense of affirmative action in college admissions, reports that 86 percent of black students at the top 28 universities are from the middle or upper-middle class.

This guy completely misses the point.

Education is not charity. Education is not welfare. The whole point of the admissions process is to find students who have the demonstrated ability to do college-level work. Selective universities are selective for a reason. They want the best students, so they can produce the best graduates, who by their accomplishments will enhance the university's reputation, and thus help it attract the best students, donations, grants, et cetera.

Again, the liberal sees education -- as every other social good -- as a "fixed pie." There is only so much education to go around, the liberal reasons, so fairness requires that the "disadvantaged" should get their share of it. And so, their must be some system to "distribute" education in an equal way among racial, ethnic and economic groups.

This is entirely wrong. Let the market operate. Let colleges seeking ability find students possessing ability. Forget about determining admission based on income, race, sex or anything else like that. If a student lacks the demonstrated ability to succeed at Michigan, Berkeley or Harvard, this is not "unfair," whatever the race or economic class of the applicant. It's just the market.

Most selective colleges and universities have been engaging in social engineering for many years, if not forever. Do you really think that legacy admissions and geographic preferences have anything to do with selecting the best students?

If such policies harm the institutions which practice them, then such institutions are ultimately creating suicide, correct? The question is, who benefits from legacies -- or athletic scholarships or geographic preferences, or whatever other admissions policy you wish to use as an analogy for affirmative action? Obviously, legacy admissions are a very old custom. Such policies would not have been implemented or continued if the institutions had not imagined they were benefitting by the arrangement. And how so? By creating strong ties between the alumni and the institution, the university helped encourage alumni donations. These donations helped the university grow -- and helped fund scholarships for less affluent students who were not legacies. Assuming that the offspring of Harvard alumni might be a cut above the herd, the legacy system gives Harvard an advantage at recruiting top students. And if the system continues over generations, you have a fine custom of "Harvard families" and "Yale families" and so on.

So legacies help build the institution and its traditions. By contrast, affirmative action is intended to destroy institutions and traditions. As practiced at contemporary American universities, affirmative action degrades intellectual standards, promotes ethnic grievance, and dissolves whatever esprit de corps might bind together the student body. This is why big-name universities have, since the 1960s ceased to be organic institutions and are now merely name-brand educational products, the Nikes and BMWs of credentialization. The whole elite mystique of the "Harvard man" has been destroyed. In fact, the majority of Harvard undergraduates are now women, anyway, so there.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.