Rewarding Strivers

6/18/2010: From the blurb from the new Century Foundation book on access to higher education, Rewarding Strivers:

Obstacles are more closely associated with class than race, suggesting affirmative action should be primarily about socioeconomic status.

Racial discrimination continues to play a role in education, but its influence is dwarfed by the role of socioeconomic status. Of the 784-point SAT gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students, Carnevale and Strohl found that just 56 points are solely attributable to race per se (being black as opposed to white). (See Figure 2.) By contrast, 399 points of the gap are from factors that are socioeconomic in nature—such has having a father who is a laborer as opposed to a physician (48 points), attending a school where 90 percent of classmates are low-income compared to one where no peers receive subsidized lunch (38 points), and having a parent who is a high school dropout as opposed to highly educated (43 points). Another 228 points are associated with factors that are sometimes matters of choice but are constrained by socioeconomic status—items such as working at a job during high school (13 points) and not taking any AP courses (81 points), which some low-income schools fail to make available.

The book seems mostly about access to highly selective universities. The review by Doug Lederman at insidehighered.com is more nuanced on the race/income issue. Support for a shift away from affirmative action based on race and towards SES is clearly becoming mainstream. President Obama has argued in favor of it, and the recent AAU/AAAS book on what universities can legally do to increase diversity repeatedly makes the point that, particularly since the Grutter decision, affirmative action that emphasizes SES is much more legally defensible than approaches that are based strictly on race.