At Elite Colleges, Racial Diversity Requires Affirmative Action

Getting more low-income students into elite colleges like Harvard and Stanford is an important goal. But it can’t replace race-based affirmative action.

A close look at the numbers shows that the only effective way to increase racial diversity at elite colleges is by considering race when deciding who gets in.

Affirmative action has come under attack, with college admissions viewed as a zero-sum game: What one group gains, another loses. For example, a high-profile lawsuit has accused Harvard of discriminating against Asian applicants in its admission process. The Department of Justice is investigating similar accusations at Yale.

There are proposals to get around the affirmative action controversy by ignoring race and instead paying attention to economic disadvantage. Give poor applicants a boost and greater racial diversity will follow, so this argument goes.

But this approach can’t do the job of race-based affirmative action for a very simple reason: Most poor people are white. Putting a thumb on the scale for low-income students will help far more white students than black or Hispanic students.

There’s no doubt that greater economic diversity is an important goal. The most selective colleges enroll more students from the top 1 percent of the income distribution than from the entire bottom half. In order to increase economic mobility, it makes sense to increase the number of low-income students in selective colleges.

But if you think about it for a moment, you will see that getting more poor students into elite colleges will do little to change their racial makeup. While black and Hispanic students are far more likely to be poor than are other students, a majority of poor students who apply to elite colleges are neither black nor Hispanic.

That’s because black and Hispanic students are a minority of high school graduates, an even smaller minority of college applicants, and a yet smaller minority of applicants to highly selective colleges.

Racial and ethnic gaps in educational attainment and achievement, which start in elementary school, widen as students move through high school and to college. An affirmative action program at selective colleges that targets students based on poverty will therefore admit far more white students than black or Hispanic students.

In the 1990s, when affirmative action was under legal challenge in Texas and newly banned by referendum in California, Professor Thomas Kane of Harvard addressed this issue. In a paper, Kane showed that just one out of six low-income applicants to elite schools was likely to be black or Hispanic. A program that gave an admissions advantage to low-income students would therefore admit five white students for every one black or Hispanic student. Today, Kane’s key point still holds: Elite colleges can’t achieve racial and ethnic diversity without directly considering race and ethnicity in admissions. There is no easy option that depends on other criteria such as income.

While this is a contentious topic, it’s important to remember that affirmative action is not an issue that directly affects most college students, because the majority attend schools that are not at all selective. When everyone can get into a school, there is no way to offer an admissions edge to anyone. And only a handful of schools are as selective as Harvard.

A far more worrying admissions practice at elite colleges has largely flown under the radar: “legacy preferences,” which privilege the families of alumni. Legacy preferences limit diversity because they replicate in the present the student bodies of the past. Fifty years ago, elite colleges were overwhelmingly white and wealthy, As a result, a policy that boosts the admissions of the children of alumni disproportionately benefits the white and wealthy.

According to documents in the Harvard case, students from alumni families are five times as likely to get in as other applicants. A full 29 percent of last year’s freshman class were relatives of Harvard graduates. The legacy advantage dwarfs any edge afforded to African-Americans or other underrepresented minorities.

Legacy admissions help applicants who, as a group, have been privileged their entire lives. This is a twisted reflection of affirmative action, which helps those who have managed to achieve excellence despite daunting hurdles.

The elite colleges can become more diverse with affirmative action and by eliminating advantages for the children of alumni. They can also add more seats, so more students can get in.

The elite colleges sit on enormous resources. Harvard, with an endowment of $38 billion, is one of the wealthiest nonprofits in the world (second only to the Gates Foundation).

Yet with these billions Harvard has done little to expand its reach in undergraduate education. In fact, it gets harder to get in with each passing year.

In the past 70 years, Harvard has expanded its undergraduate enrollment by just 2,400 seats. It will enroll 6,700 undergraduates in 2018, compared to 4,300 in 1948, a growth of 50 percent.

As Harvard and the other Ivies have limited their expansion, despite their deep pockets, the competition to get into these schools has grown ever more intense. When the chances of winning diminish, people tend to find scapegoats for their losses. Hence the ugly battles over admissions and affirmative action.

I don’t mean to pick on Harvard but it has been a lightning rod in this national debate and it is important to me. I was a Harvard undergraduate and graduate student, and professor (after nine years on the Harvard faculty, I moved to the University of Michigan, in 2008). I have spoken out on this topic in the past, both as a Harvard alumna and as a scholar.

Harvard changed my life: It opened worlds that were unimaginable to my parents, neither of whom graduated from college (my dad was a high school dropout).

Elite colleges like Harvard pour staggering resources into the education of their fortunate students, and hoarding that opportunity is unconscionable. The billions in endowments held by the elite schools could be used to expand access to an exceptional education.