Affirmative action is one of the Supreme Court’s latest targets. In a decision issued in late April, the Court upheld Michigan’s constitutional amendment barring affirmative action at public universities. While the decision officially pertains only to the state of Michigan, the conservative justices of the Supreme Court have effectively given a nod of approval to other states considering similar measures. As skepticism over the legitimacy of affirmative action intensifies, universities will find themselves searching for alternative methods of ensuring diverse student bodies.
Class-based affirmative action, which involves extending a selective advantage to low-income applicants, is one alternative that warrants serious consideration.
Such a strategy would be particularly welcome at Dartmouth, where many students come from well-off families. This, at least, is the tentative conclusion that can be drawn from the scant data the College releases on the socioeconomic backgrounds of its students. In the College’s profile of the Class of 2017, for instance, you will find a concrete breakdown of the class’s geographic, ethnic and academic backgrounds that flatteringly paints the Class of 2017 as a diverse community of high school scholars. What you will not find, however, is the socioeconomic distribution of the class. How many students grew up below the poverty line? How many grew up in luxury? The answers to these questions are just as relevant as the number of students who come from the Mid-Atlantic (27 percent) or graduated as valedictorians (30 percent of students with rank). The conspicuous absence of publicly available data on students’ socioeconomic backgrounds suggests that the College is sweeping ugly facts under the rug.
Sure enough, obscured beneath the flattering data that the College publicly touts are indirect indicators of students’ socioeconomic backgrounds that reveal a more sober assessment of diversity, as similarly demonstrated in a January 2012 column in The Harvard Crimson critiquing Harvard’s socioeconomic composition. According to the Dartmouth Fact Book, 54 percent of students received aid in the 2012-13 fiscal year. This fact implies that a staggering 46 percent of Dartmouth students come from families who are able to pay over a quarter-million dollars in tuition, room and board over four years without assistance from the College. Furthermore, Dartmouth’s Financial Aid Calculator, which provides an unofficial estimate of the aid a student can expect to receive based on the income of his parents, suggests that grant and scholarship assistance stops flowing for households with incomes above $140,000, which is right around the 90th percentile of household income earned in the U.S. If we assume that the number of American Dartmouth students requesting aid is close to the overall average of 54 percent, the upshot of all of this is that nearly half of American Dartmouth students come from families in the top 10 percent of U.S. income earners. Even worse, applicants request aid at a greater rate than admitted students do, which suggests that the richer applicants who can pay their way are more likely to be offered admissions slots.
As it turns out, then, class-based affirmative action already has a role in Dartmouth’s admissions process, but it is the rich rather than the poor who receive preferential treatment. Through elite private schools, SAT prep courses and “life-changing” overseas vacations, applicants from rich families can buy themselves acceptance letters while equally intelligent applicants from poor and middle class families are turned away. There may, of course, be more than a mere opportunity gap between the rich and the poor at play here. Dartmouth has a direct incentive for admitting students who can pay full tuition. Not only will they keep the College’s massively bloated budget afloat in the short term, but when they take lucrative professions by storm in a couple of years, big alumni donations will quickly follow. The children of the wealthy get admitted, receive an elite, unparalleled undergraduate education while networking with other children of the wealthy and then proceed to go off and accumulate more wealth — some of which returns to the College. It is time to put an end to this vicious circle, which only serves the rich and perpetuates societal inequality. If the College truly values diversity, it must recruit and admit more lower- and middle-class students.
