Higher Ed Stakeholders Look to Socioeconomic Status as Alternative to Race in Admissions

The  U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to strike down affirmative action in college admissions in June has left universities, nonprofit organizations,Richard Kahlenberg and other higher education stakeholders with a single question: What are the best paths forward? As fall approaches, higher ed institutions are looking to socioeconomic status to fulfill the proxy that race once held to help diversify student bodies.

Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute and a nonresident scholar at Georgetown University, is an advocate for class-based affirmative action in higher education admissions.

“People do not recognize that economic affirmative programs, if intelligently structured, do recognize the realities of race in America,” said Kahlenberg. “It is precisely because of our history of racial discrimination that factors such as family wealth and neighborhood environment will disproportionately benefit Black and Hispanic applicants.”

Kahlenberg, who joined as an expert witness for the plaintiffs in the Harvard University and University of North Carolina (UNC) litigation, says the economic achievement gap between students has grown twice as large as the racial gap. Harvard and UNC had about 15 times as many wealthy as poor students on campus.

Programs like Landscape and the Davis Scale have been developed across the U.S. to help identify the economic factors for which Kahlenberg has advocated.

Landscape is an admissions tool that helps universities efficiently assess disadvantages associated with neighborhoods and schools by typing in a student’s address. This tool, developed by the College Board, is meant to help admissions offices go beyond test scores and GPAs and considers what students have achieved in the context of where they’ve learned and lived.

The Davis Scale, developed at the University of California, Davis, (UC Davis) in 2012, is a system used to establish an adversity score for each candidate. This system issues scores on a scale of zero to 99. It considers eight categories, including family income, whether an applicant’s parents went to college, whether applicants come from an underserved area, and whether applicants help support their nuclear families. Admissions decisions are based on that score, grades, test scores, recommendations, essays, and interviews.