Affirmative action should target poverty, not race

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The U.S. Supreme Court's ruling on affirmative action was met with predictable outcry from those claiming it will tear asunder universities' capacity to encourage diverse student bodies. It also elicited self-satisfaction from conservatives, some of whom (even here at the University of Minnesota) have argued that we have too much diversity already.

The court's ruling is hardly a model of legal clarity; nor are its immediate implications for college admissions straightforward. Yet in the 50 years since the Supreme Court's Bakke decision initiated the high court's involvement in racial educational preference, there has been a consistent failure to grasp the distinction between disadvantage and entitlement based on income vs. discrimination based on race.

Seven years ago on these pages, in the wake of Philando Castile's killing, I wrote that those at the bottom of the income ladder in America, whether Black or white, share a forlorn hope. Whatever their desire to move up the ladder, they are unlikely to move very far in their lifetimes. They are largely trapped at the bottom.

Research by Stanford University economics Prof. Raj Chetty, using tax data, found that areas in the U.S. with greater income inequality also produce less upward mobility for children from low-income families. This is the so-called "Gatsby Curve." In Charlotte, N.C., for example, a child whose household ranked in the lowest fifth in income 10 years ago had less than a 5% chance of reaching the top fifth.

But the shared forlorn prospects of poor Americans, white or Black, suggests something crucial to the political dynamics of affirmative action. While nearly a fifth of Black Americans remain poor, more than 2.5 times as many of the poor are white.

In 2021, 19.5% of Black people living in the U.S. were living below the poverty line, compared with 8.2% of white people. This meant that 8.7 million Black Americans were living below the poverty line (19.5% of 44.43 million Black individuals) compared with 20.6 million white Americans (8.2% of 251.82 million white individuals).

Why is this significant? First, because if preferences for college admission were granted to individuals based not on race but on income, many more Black people than white people would qualify in proportion to their share of the population. On the other hand, income-based admissions would treat poor white applicants equally, recognizing that they share the disadvantages poverty imposes.

Second, it is clear from the record that most of the benefits of affirmative action have missed targeting poor minorities and have tended to favor members of the middle and upper classes, who are better prepared to take advantage of the programs and less trapped by the Gatsby Curve than their poorer brethren.

Bertrand Cooper, writing in the June 19 Atlantic about Harvard's admissions, noted that only about a quarter of its latest freshman class comes from families with incomes below $85,000, its threshold for full financial aid, which is far above the 2023 federal poverty line of $30,000 for a family of four. Extrapolating from these findings, Cooper found that "only seven or eight of 154 Black freshmen would have come from poor families. The other 140 or so Black students at Harvard were likely raised outside of poverty and probably as far from the bottom as any Black child can hope to be."

Third, the inherent unfairness of this situation to poor whites creates deep resentment, making them easy targets for a David Duke or Donald Trump, who can tell them, with some justification, that the odds of affirmative action are stacked against them.

In recognition of these distortions, the New York Times reported on July 2, the University of California, Davis has implemented a scoring system seeking to measure disadvantages for applications to medical school that are not explicitly race-based. In addition, the College Board, responsible for SAT testing, has been experimenting since 2019 with socioeconomic indicators using a tool called Landscape.

However, many defenders of the current, now eviscerated, system argue that these efforts cannot replace affirmative action. And conservative groups claim that they are simply stand-ins for race.

Both groups are wrong. As the data cited above shows, socioeconomic disadvantage resulting from poverty is not simply a stand-in for race. However, socioeconomic testimonials and claims of a qualitative nature ("I grew up in a log cabin") are much easier to game than income numbers based on tax returns and other hard data. Income as a basis for legal differences in treatment is well-established in law, as any affluent senior paying the income-adjusted premium for Medicare coverage can attest.

In addition to personal and household income data, the other key parameter that should figure in education preferences is wealth. In 2021, economists at the Federal Reserve Board in Washington reported that in the U.S., the average Black and Hispanic or Latino households earn about half as much income as the average white household but own only about 15-20% as much net wealth. This wealth gap has widened notably over the past few decades. As in current college applications for financial aid, family assets as well as family income should figure in a determination of admission preference.

In short, despite the muddled reasoning and sky-is-falling rhetoric surrounding the Supreme Court decision, reasonable, economically rigorous criteria can continue to support access to higher education for the disadvantaged. Income and wealth should be explicitly recognized as criteria for righting the imbalance of opportunity in American education for poorer Americans — whatever their race or ethnicity.

Carlisle Ford Runge is Distinguished McKnight University Professor of Applied Economics and Law at the University of Minnesota.