In the most widely used scheme of affirmative action in American universities, students from underrepresented minority backgrounds are given an advantage in the admissions process. While this practice has made some progress in addressing minority representation at elite private schools such as Dartmouth, the practice has not done enough to address the biggest issue with top schools in America — they have become nearly the sole playground of socially advantaged elites, no matter their racial background.
For evidence of this phenomenon, we need look no further than the income achievement gap. This disparity is now twice as large as the black-white achievement gap and growing, whereas 50 years ago, the reverse was true. Plenty of other statistics can attest to this trend. Seventy-four percent of students who attend elite colleges come from families with incomes in the top quartile, while only 3 percent come from families in the bottom quartile. No doubt much of this is due to affordability issues, despite many top schools’ large financial aid packages. Some part of this, however, must be explained by the admissions criteria of top colleges.
Think about the admissions process — it naturally favors students who not only have high SAT scores, which are already strongly positively correlated with family income, but who also have the opportunity to participate in numerous extracurricular activities. These credentials are increasingly valuable as signaling mechanisms for college admissions. Put simply, a rural student from public school in Montana is probably not going to have the level and diversity of opportunities as a student coming out of Stuyvesant High School, Philips Exeter Academy or a public school in Montgomery County, Md., where I am from.
This underrepresentation of economically disadvantaged students translates into negative outcomes, namely growing income and social inequality, problems decried by thinkers ranging from Paul Krugman to Charles Murray. Elite institutions like our own offer a certain leveling effect by providing opportunity for upward mobility to students from disadvantaged backgrounds. They do not confer special benefits to those from privileged backgrounds. Yet it is the latter group that continues to dominate top college campuses in increasing numbers. Instead of forming a ladder for the motivated to climb, the American education system is reproducing and entrenching privilege.
Race-based affirmative action does not effectively address this issue, especially when compared with other affirmative action programs. Eighty-six percent of African Americans at top universities are from the middle or upper classes, even though 33 percent of African Americans in the nation identify as lower class. Targeting disadvantaged schools, rather than disadvantaged racial groups, may be a better way to fix this problem and help close the growing gap in American society.
For example, the University of Texas has a program under which Texas public school students ranked in the top 10 percent of their class are given automatic admission to any one of Texas’ public universities. The students from this program are from more diverse economic and racial backgrounds than the students admitted under the school’s general admission process, which uses an affirmative action policy that was recently upheld in Fisher v. University of Texas. Similar results occurred when 10 other universities replaced race-based affirmative action with socioeconomic-based programs — seven of them saw increases in racial diversity, and all have seen an increase in the proportion of working-class students at their schools.
The key lesson from these programs’ success is that we shouldn’t judge people from disadvantaged backgrounds by lower standards, but rather by different standards — specifically, by looking at them relative to their peers. Somebody who may be a leader and striver in their own community may not look great relative to top candidates from private schools, but they almost definitely have the same motivation and capability to succeed.
Due to class size constraints, programs that objectively judge students relative to their peers are admittedly difficult to implement at a small school like Dartmouth. However, the College could improve outreach to schools dominated by socioeconomically disadvantaged groups of all races and compare them to extracurricular-laden private school students with a grain of salt. This would be a small step but potentially meaningful step toward closing the inequality gap in America.