Daniel Kasell: Creating diversity with a socioeconomic basis

In line with former President Clinton's refrain of "mend it, don't end it," affirmative action would better achieve its goal of diversity were it more narrowly tailored. Regardless of how the Supreme Court holds in its pending cases, we should debate the merits of alternative structures.

I believe that for affirmative action to fulfill its mission, economic hardship should replace race as an explicit factor in the college admissions process. There must also be an increased commitment to encouraging and facilitating the matriculation of students from lower socioeconomic classes. Hence, "wealth-based affirmative action plus."

All things being equal, an entering freshman class would represent the country's racial mix and so, would be sufficiently diverse. But, of course, all things are not equal. Minorities are underrepresented at universities because they are overrepresented among the nation's economically downtrodden. As such, minorities disproportionately bear the brunt of the usual socioeconomic forces that make it difficult for members of the lower economic class, regardless of race, to ascend the social ladder.

Yet, like society, ethnic communities are not economically monolithic. So the only minorities who would be underrepresented in a class selected via colorblind criteria are those residing in the lower economic class. Middle and upper class minorities would be accurately represented because they do not face the stumbling blocks of poverty and have as much opportunity as anyone.

Affirmative action should primarily be about leveling the playing field. The use of race as a proxy for economic hardship not only over-includes middle and upper class minorities; it also under-includes lower class white people. They too would add diversity and deserve equal opportunity.

If economic hardship replaced race as an admissions criterion, those minority students who need affirmative action would be covered to the same degree that they are today. And middle and upper class minorities would still be able to add diversity to a degree consistent with their population. The payoff, however, would be the extension of affirmative action to the non-minority poor.

Currently, however, lower economic class whites are not only unassisted by affirmative action; lower class minorities do not truly enjoy its benefits either. Inadequate effort is spent recruiting them and insufficient resources are devoted to financing their college education.

To be sure, there are other factors involved as well, such as the pressing need to help support their families, not to mention the debilitating effects of inner-city crime. But one societal scourge at a time.

The bottom line is that, given its realistic scope of correction, affirmative action alone does not deliver its purported level of diversity. After all, middle and upper class minorities likely share more "life experience" with whites of a similar economic background than they do with lower class minorities. So the mending of affirmative action needs to coincide with more intense recruitment of lower economic class applicants as well as increased availability of financial aid.

Perhaps schools want to avoid replacing race with wealth because of the increased demand for need-based financial assistance. If so, then schools should disclose their concern so that the costs and benefits of swapping the two criteria could be weighed in the open. Congress and state legislatures might then debate the merits of allocating increased subsidies for educational financial aid. Is not tapping the talent and productivity of every able-minded American a compelling governmental interest?

At the end of the day, it remains incumbent upon us to drastically improve the quality of inner-city public education. Prioritizing this endeavor, which is nothing short of a rescue effort, will, in the long term, reduce the need to enhance college applications artificially. For now, though, it will better prepare the beneficiaries of affirmative action for higher learning. It will also improve the odds that students will remain in high school long enough to qualify for a college education.

While we can never level the playing field completely, the more we remedy the root problems, the less we will need to resort to policy band-aids like affirmative action. However, in 2003, "wealth-based affirmative action plus" would avoid the over- and under-inclusiveness of the race-based variant and address head-on the impediments to real diversity. Such a refinement of policy would more efficiently do the good work set out to be done.

Daniel Kasell is a first-year Law student from New York City.

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