One Critic of Race-Based Admissions Says Colleges Can Still Improve Diversity

Richard Kahlenberg has been enthralled with the multiracial, working-class coalitions envisioned by Robert F. Kennedy and civil rights activist Bayard Rustin since he was an undergraduate student at Harvard University. Decades later, Kahlenberg says those ideals led him to an unexpected alliance with conservatives in their fight to end race-based affirmative action.

Kahlenberg, a policy scholar who is currently director of housing policy and the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute, was an expert witness for Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) in its lawsuits against Harvard and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Ultimately, the Supreme Court two years ago struck down race-based affirmative action programs in most college admissions. 

In his new book, Class Matters: The Fight to Get Beyond Race Preferences, Reduce Inequality, and Build Real Diversity at America’s Colleges, Kahlenberg explains why he aligned himself with the group.

The self-described liberal argues that race-based admissions programs have created racial diversity only at the expense of socioeconomic diversity, pointing to statistics showing that Black and Hispanic students at selective colleges come disproportionately from wealthy families. 

Kahlenberg believes a class-based affirmative action program that gives preferences to students who have lower family income, less generational wealth, and come from poorer neighborhoods would maintain roughly similar levels of racial diversity while producing far more socioeconomic diversity.

But the higher education landscape is much different today than when Kahlenberg sided with SFFA against UNC-CH, or even when Class Matters went to press a few months ago. The Assembly spoke with Kahlenberg about his vision for college admissions, what Donald Trump’s policy changes mean for higher education, and how he thinks about his role. 

This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

You conclude the book by saying you’re optimistic about the future of class-based affirmative action. Do you still feel that way after the first months of the Trump administration?

I would say that the Trump administration’s impact cuts in two different directions. 

The reason that most elite institutions of higher education avoided looking at economic disadvantage and instead focused narrowly on race was that they were trying to accomplish racial justice on the cheap. To the extent that Donald Trump succeeds in hurting the economic conditions of colleges, that’s bad for class-based affirmative action. 

On the other hand, Donald Trump has put elite institutions of higher education under the microscope in a very vivid way for Americans, and it is possible that some leaders in higher education will take the new scrutiny as an opportunity to look in the mirror and say, “Why is it that that confidence in higher education has has collapsed, particularly among Republicans? What can we do to regain the trust of average Americans?”

And there are a number of reasons that particularly selective colleges are unpopular with Americans and with the right. One essential challenge is that elite higher education is seen as out of touch, as not serving the deeply American goal of social mobility—that their institutions were for out-of-touch rich students. That ought to put pressure on universities to reform themselves by opening the doors to more working-class students. 

Many schools released demographic data about their first admissions cohort after the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard ruling. SFFA sent letters to schools, including Duke, that saw a drop in the percentage of Asian Americans, saying they suspected the universities were still using now-illegal race-based admissions practices. Do you feel the same way?

The fact that an institution like Duke did greatly expand its socioeconomic diversity, doubling the number of Pell Grant students over a couple-year period, is encouraging to me. They created a brand new, very generous financial aid program for students in North Carolina and South Carolina. Those new developments help Duke explain why they were able to preserve racial diversity even after the SFFA decision.

Having said that, it is possible that institutions like Duke are doing two things at once. They could be expanding socioeconomic diversity as a way of getting racial diversity, which is perfectly legal. It is possible they’re also doing things behind the scenes that we can’t see that are not consistent with SFFA. 

Part of the challenge, as you know, is that universities are notoriously opaque about their admissions processes. So it’s really only when litigation is filed that researchers can look under the hood and figure out what counts in admissions. 

The Trump administration issued a Dear Colleague letter that said using race-neutral methods of increasing racial diversity won’t be allowed. The administration is taking aim at your policy goals. How are you feeling about that?

I was appalled by the Dear Colleague letter. No court has ever held that seeking a racially integrated student body at the college level is itself an unlawful goal. The SFFA decision included language from the majority that said the goals of racial diversity are admirable. 

There was a test case involving Thomas Jefferson High School in northern Virginia, where an extreme right-wing argument was made that Thomas Jefferson High School had considered socioeconomic disadvantage and geography in its admissions plan—no use of race—and that that was somehow illegal. The plaintiffs lost in the Fourth Circuit. When it was appealed, the U.S. Supreme Court denied the case.

There were two justices who wrote a dissent about the denial of cert in the case, Justices Alito and Thomas, and they took a line that the Trump administration would take—that looking at factors like socioeconomic status is proxy discrimination. I think they’re wrong on the merits, but I was very gratified that with a very, very conservative Supreme Court, there were only two justices who stake out that position. 

Administrations can write Dear Colleague letters, but they don’t have the force of law. And I don’t think there is an appetite among a majority of U.S. Supreme Court justices to go down the path of saying that a race-neutral strategy, like giving a break to economically disadvantaged students of all races, is itself unlawful if part of the goal is to achieve racial diversity. 

You’ve argued that admissions policies should take more than income into account and also include wealth, geography, and other factors. What advice are you giving admissions offices right now about how to design their programs?

Ideally, an admissions program would use a test of fairness, which says: Let’s evaluate a student’s record and accomplishments in light of what obstacles they had to overcome in life. 

Coming from a low-income family is an obstacle on average, and so that ought to count. But if you stop there, you will miss many of the hurdles that exist in American society for economically disadvantaged students. And you won’t get the racial diversity you’re looking for either. So it is important in particular to look at factors like family wealth and neighborhood socioeconomic conditions. 

Coming from a low-wealth family predicts lower levels of academic success, so a student who comes from a low-wealth family and manages to do pretty well despite that has something special to offer. Likewise, there’s a big difference between working-class students in a high-poverty neighborhood and going to high-poverty schools, as opposed to a working-class student who goes to a middle-class and lives in a middle-class community. As a matter of fairness, all of those factors are important. 

There is also a bigger positive racial dividend when you provide a broader look at socioeconomic disadvantage than just income. Precisely because of the legacy of slavery and segregation and redlining, the Black-white wealth gap is much, much larger than the Black-white income gap. Wealth better captures history because it is handed down over generations. 

Ignoring wealth is not only unfair, it also will on average penalize Black and Hispanic students who are of the same income level as white students. The same is true for neighborhood. One of the astonishing findings in the social science research is that low-income, white families live on average in more economically advantaged neighborhoods than middle-income Black families. And this has to do with racial segregation in our American neighborhoods. 

There’s a similar question about the states funding public colleges. The vast majority of students do not go to selective colleges. You write a lot about ways to socioeconomically diversify flagship campuses. But, especially with federal funding decreasing, would it be more effective for social mobility if states prioritized support for non-flagship campuses and community college systems?

I’ll give you perhaps an unsatisfying answer. 

Yes, states should invest much, much more in community colleges. But I also don’t want to lose sight of the selective institutions of higher education, because it matters who goes to these institutions. One study found that 50 percent of government leaders and about 50 percent of corporate leaders came from just 12 highly resourced institutions. There is evidence that students who attend flagship institutions disproportionately make up the leadership class within the state.

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So states need to care about both the institutions where the vast majority of students will receive their education—community colleges and non-selective four-year institutions—but also make sure that steps are taken to diversify the flagship institutions, because it’s important that more of America’s leaders have experienced what it’s like to live on the other side of the tracks, what it’s like to struggle economically. 

Budgets are ultimately limited, but we shouldn’t accept existing levels of spending as written in stone. I saw this vividly during the litigation against the University of North Carolina. A UNC official testified in court that some of the class-based affirmative action ideas that I and SFFA were advocating were too expensive. Within two weeks of the SFFA decision, UNC announced a generous new financial aid program. So I’m skeptical of claims that all of these ideas are too expensive. 

You argue that you had to remove the option for race-based affirmative action before colleges would invest in class-based programs. Given all that’s happened since, do you regret allying with SFFA?

I don’t have regret because the SFFA decision itself was, in my view, a win for working-class students of all races, including working-class Black and Hispanic students who tended not to be included in the race-based affirmative action programs. I think the decision unleashed something very positive for the country. 

The fact that Donald Trump is now invoking the decision for nefarious ends is, I think, less threatening than it might appear at the moment, because I’m confident that the U.S. Supreme Court will not go along with Trump’s entire agenda of interfering with the academic freedom of universities and striking down class-based affirmative action. 

I disagree strongly with much of what the Trump administration is doing. But the administration’s actions are not legally justified by the SFFA decision. They’re trying to stretch the decision to say things it did not in fact say.