In the wake of the Supreme Court’s UNC/Harvard decision to overturn the use of race-conscious affirmative action policies in college recruiting, many have bemoaned the end of what was seen as a panacea ensuring fair admissions practices. Indeed, some colleges have seen their racial makeup affected by the ruling, although the effects have varied wildly between schools. However, a ruling taking away one method of increasing diversity in admissions comes off as an entirely too convenient scapegoat. It’s much easier to blame a set of arbiters in faraway Washington, D.C. than to examine one’s own practices. Only the most selective fifth of institutions had made race an important criterion in admissions. Despite that, minority students were proportionately less likely to attend these selective schools compared to white students. The Supreme Court took away a strategy that clearly wasn’t making elite institutions into bastions of diversity. Thus, if these universities cannot adapt and find other methods, the fault lies with them — not with the Court. And while removing inequities won’t be easy, there are solutions that schools can pursue.

“If you look at the Ivy League universities, the percentage of people of color has definitely gone down,” senior and Washington University commit Dima Layth said. “I think there [ought] to be more opportunities. I’ve heard that there are more programs specifically targeting people of color and first gen students, but I don’t think that’s enough, because we have [fewer] opportunities. Being able to make sure that more of us are represented in the college setting [is important].”

If elite universities truly want to eliminate inequality, though, they must recognize that there are more dimensions to it than just race. Though a student’s ethnicity can affect their well-being across a broad range of indicators, factors such as income level can be even more salient predictors. There’s more than one way to be disadvantaged, and affirmative action policies weren’t taking that into account. 

Trust in top educational institutions is falling. Universities exist to drive our pursuit of a brighter future, helping us envision a world more prosperous and more equal than the one we have now. If they aim to capture the collective imagination once again, they must live up to their lofty ideals and hold this truth to be self-evident: that all men truly are created equal.

A broken system

Income gaps in college education are on the rise. That means that the wealthier a prospective student’s parents are, the more likely that student is to attend an elite institution. This isn’t due to objective measures of achievement. Once they arrive on campus, lower-income students immediately become just as likely to succeed as higher-income ones; they aren’t worse as students than their wealthier peers. However, members of the top percentile of the income distribution are significantly more likely to gain admission to top schools than peers with similar standardized test scores — and that’s not even considering the fact that wealthier students score higher on tests due to factors such as access to paid tutoring and the ability to pay for multiple tests.

“Parkway West specifically prepares students to go [to] college,” Layth said. “I changed schools; previously I went to school in Maryland. Compared to their curriculum, this is so much harder. They really overprepare you. Our curriculum, especially in math, is much more advanced and rigorous. A lot of kids who change schools feel really overwhelmed, and they struggle in the beginning because our [classes are] rigorous.”

Another common indicator of success, grade-point average, remains remarkably similar across socioeconomic classes. That means that the gap in admissions between wealthier and less wealthy students is neither explained by test scores nor by grades. “Need blind admissions,” or the perception that schools do not take income into account in admissions decisions, is a lie; in fact, it seems that schools are essentially finding ways to simulate “reverse affirmative action” policies that favor wealthy students.

“WashU, as an example, [is] very clear with [their intention of] meeting 100 percent of student need,” college and career counselor Chris Lorenz said. “Need [can be] determined from a completed FAFSA form or CSS profile, and WashU is committed to matching that, 100 percent. What they tell us on the front end is that they don’t admit or deny students based on the level of need that a student has. Logic would [suggest] that they would accept [a] kid paying full price over [one with] need, because that’s going to generate money for them, but what they say is that [this] is not a part of their decision making. Now, does that hold true at WashU, even though that’s what they say? We can only hope. Does that hold true at every college in the country? Probably not. I’m sure it is a real conversation happening behind closed doors that we’ll really never know the true answer to.”

Because top institutions are engines of upward socioeconomic mobility for disadvantaged students, it’s important that such students are able to access them. These universities have the potential to create change, but not the will to carry it out. In order to make that happen, the causes of inequity must be examined and addressed.

How it happened

There are few schools that would turn down an opportunity to have more and more prestigious applicants, and there are few better ways for a school to secure more and more prestigious applicants than a high ranking from a popular college ranking system such as US News and World Report. That means that schools are highly incentivized to take these rankings into account when they make decisions — and that includes admissions decisions.

“Kids who are looking at the rankings and making application decisions might choose to apply to a ranked school over one that isn’t [ranked] because it’s viewed by US News as being a top tier school,” Chris Lorenz said. “[A ranked school’s] applicant pool may become more competitive because they’re a ranked school or have a ranked program, and because the applicant pool is stronger, they’re able to select students with higher GPAs [and] higher ACT [scores] because those kinds of kids are applying.”

Though a high ranking helps a school gain prestige, research indicates that securing that ranking often comes at a cost: admitting fewer lower-income students. This is partly because of the aforementioned disparity in test scores between lower- and higher-income students; schools who attempt to move up in the rankings are more likely to prioritize high scores over diversity, keeping lower-income students out. The affirmative action programs used by elite universities also allowed them to create racial diversity while still prioritizing scores over economic diversity. These programs would target the most well-off members of minority groups, which counteracted the intended contribution to social mobility in Black and Hispanic communities. Schools got the benefits of racial diversity and an elite student body without creating the benefits to society that would come from admitting poorer minority students. They’ve always carefully ensured that their support for diversity doesn’t interfere with their rankings.

Despite their importance, test scores aren’t the only reason that schools need wealthy students to reach high rankings. Recall that if scores — that bedrock of college rankings — were the only variable considered in college decisions, there would be more economic diversity in colleges, not less. There’s another variable that’s being taken into account here, and it’s a very intuitive one: money. Because wealthy families don’t receive need-based financial aid, the costs of a class-based affirmative action system would be exorbitant. The richest students generate massive sums of wealth for the institutions they attend. Even after adjusting for inflation, universities have spent increasingly more money on educating students in recent years, despite funding cuts from states.

“[Schools] have bills to pay. They have projects to fund. Some colleges have very robust endowments, and the endowments generate ongoing residual monies to cover campus costs, [but] they have to pay their professors, they have to pay for their buildings, infrastructure, [and] upkeep. Colleges must make a certain amount, and they know that. [So], they can only give so much in scholarship [money],” Lorenz said. “Some colleges set deadlines for scholarship applications because they don’t have unlimited funds to continue to give scholarships to kids. Tuition, cost, movement, board, all these things, all the money that a college takes in from those items, pays for the infrastructure of the college.”

Whenever possible, universities have tried to pass on costs to students and their families. The economic priorities of top institutions become clear when the effects of federal student aid are studied: when governments have increased support to low-income students, schools have cut institutional aid to students and spent the money elsewhere. As long as these elite colleges are reaching a baseline, “acceptable” level of diversity, they have shown no interest in exceeding that baseline. Instead, they’ve essentially stolen from taxpayers in order to pour more money into their operations, spending that — you guessed it — boosts their U.S. News rankings. These schools survived in the past without reaching their current spending levels. Seeking more economic diversity would be expensive for colleges, but that doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t be feasible.

A difficult solution

Wealthy schools have claimed that they need race-based affirmative action policies in order to create racial diversity. However, an admissions strategy that adjusts students’ SAT scores to consider factors such as high school and parental income level could create a level of racial diversity at top schools similar to the one that existed before affirmative action. The main barrier to creating diversity is not anti-affirmative action policy. If there is one, it is an economic barrier. 

This barrier might not be as insurmountable as it seems, however. For an example of what this system might cost, we can look to Johns Hopkins University. Johns Hopkins was able to make students from families with incomes under $65,000 24% of their incoming student class. They planned to do this in perpetuity with the proceeds of a $1.8 billion donation representing a fifth of their endowment, out of which they spend roughly $168 million per year on need-based aid. To achieve the level of diversity present under a fair class-based affirmative action system, they would need to move that 24th percentile benchmark to an income level of around $41,000, the 25th income percentile. This would make the bottom fourth of the income distribution constitute a fourth of the incoming students; currently this fourth of the student body is made up by the bottom 41% of the income distribution. 

It’s a big jump, but not insurmountable. For a school like Harvard, with its $50 billion endowment, the cost of student aid for an economically balanced incoming class would be easily met; they have more than enough cash on hand. Other, less wealthy schools might face challenges. An increase in public spending on colleges tied to progress in socioeconomic diversity could give these institutions a financial incentive to be more diverse, not less so. In order to make these shifts happen, colleges must have a shift in values. If they truly believe that diversity is important, they must be willing to sacrifice for it; if they are willing to sacrifice for it, they will be able to achieve it.

How we reach it

The status quo in college admissions is difficult to break up because the wealthiest students and the most elite schools have a symbiotic relationship. The students pump up the schools’ rankings and pour money into their programs, and in return, they gain preferential admission into renowned institutions. Those with the means and the academic credentials to do so are unlikely to turn down the opportunity to attend selective colleges, and with some schools boasting yield rates as high as 80%, it’s likely that any who cast blame upon them would have made the same choice.

That doesn’t mean that students are helpless to create change, however. One helpful alteration would be to decrease the salience of the rankings that create perverse incentives for schools. Instead of looking at school prestige when making college choices, consider better measures of fit like the size of the school, the location, the programs they offer and the campus culture. Those who want to attend a top-level research institution should do it because they think they will enjoy and profit from the experience, not because it has a single digit next to its name on US News. The main reason that a school would be incentivized to pursue rankings at any cost is because their next wave of applicants cares about those rankings. For example, a student who loves Cornell University because it is Cornell isn’t creating that incentive in the same way as a student who “loves” Cornell because it is the eleventh-ranked university in the country.

“The rankings reflect groupings of schools that are top tier,” Lorenz said. “Worrying about what schools [are ranked], one versus five versus 15, and thinking that there’s a huge difference between those [is unfounded].”

Another way for students to wield power lies in activism, which can affect university behavior. Students must express the importance of true diversity to institutions, and be willing to sacrifice material comfort to allow their universities to prioritize creating that diversity. If students care more about whether a school has a diverse student population, then colleges might, too.

Rather than being an actual driver of change, affirmative action policies at elite universities papered over elitist practices that systematically disadvantaged those at the bottom of the socioeconomic structure. The Supreme Court peeled back the veneer with its UNC/Harvard decision, allowing us to change the narrative about who gets to go to the best schools. Administrators complain that the bandage has been ripped off, while all along, their processes needed surgery. Selective colleges have been stratified for too long. It’s time we normalize equity.