Affirmative Action and Socio-Economic Status
Affirmative Action is a set of policies and practices that work to help disadvantaged communities reach higher levels of education. It allows schools and employers to use race as a factor in admissions and help those who have suffered from discrimination. Heavy scrutiny recently befell this process in the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard lawsuit, with the plaintiff arguing that Harvard has been discriminating against Asian Americans.
Affirmative Action could work much more effectively by considering socioeconomic status instead of race.
According to Princeton Sociologists Espenshade and Radford, Asian Americans have to score 140 points higher than whites, 280 points higher than Hispanics and 450 points higher than blacks on the 1600 point SAT to have the same chances of getting into top colleges.
But income, not race, is the most important factor in reaching higher levels of education. A Stanford study found that the difference in standardized test scores between a child from a family in the 90th percentile of family income distribution and a child in the 10th percentile is double that of the gap between black and white students. A different study by the Century Foundation found that in terms of SAT scores, socioeconomic obstacles were seven times as large as those created by race.
Affirmative Action could work much more effectively by considering socioeconomic status instead of race. While our current system of affirmative action has succeeded in increasing black and Latinx/Hispanic enrollment, it often does not help those who need it most. A family with more money, regardless of their race, is able to invest more in their children, allowing them to pursue extracurriculars and hire tutors to beat out poorer families in the college application process.
Because of this, at competitive schools like Yale and Harvard Law, only 5 percent of incoming students come from the bottom 50 percent of the socioeconomic spectrum, while 60 percent come from the top 10 percent. Meanwhile, Daniel Fisher of Forbes reports that 86 percent of African-Americans at selective universities are in the middle or upper class. This shows us that those in poverty who need and deserve the most help are still being shut out of these institutions. Instead of helping a large portion of the disadvantaged, race-based Affirmative Action is just giving many wealthy blacks and Latinxs an advantage over their peers.
It’s unjust to ignore the fact that every single race has members distributed at different points on the income spectrum. Our race-based Affirmative Action completely overlooks the struggles of each individual and groups people together just because of their race. Doing this also categorizes generally poorer students from already underrepresented countries such as the Philippines and Vietnam with “model minority” applicants of Chinese, Japanese, or Korean descent. Since the lives of people from these countries differ wildly, placing them in the same checkbox inflicts major harm on the chances of marginalized Asians being accepted.
Because of the many distinctions between people in one racial group, giving an affluent black or Latinx applicant benefits over a low-income white or Asian does not make our society more equitable. Instead it continues to only give opportunities to those who already have the most resources. This exacerbates the already substantial wage gap and continues the stratification of the American people, causing more unnecessary divides within our country.
When implemented, this focus on income as opposed to race promotes greater economic diversity while also continuing to create racially diverse student bodies. According to a 2012 study by Century Foundation, seven out of ten public universities that used socioeconomic-based Affirmative Action were able to maintain or even increase their proportion of black or Latinx students. Additionally, this system offers a more concrete standard for student aid and can relieve some of the racial tensions that we observe in the SFFA v. Harvard case.
But the greatest benefit of class-based Affirmative Action is that it will allow for more class mobility within the United States. Since income-based Affirmative Action will always help those with the least resources, it will make it easier for the poor to attain higher paying jobs, bringing them out of poverty.
No child should be held responsible for the actions of their ancestors. Basing affirmative action on socioeconomics rather than race will be a great step towards a brighter future with help given to those who truly need it.