In search of fairness: a better way - UCLA shows that class-based affirmative action won't lead to a 'whiteout'.

• Author: Kahlenberg, Richard D.

Ever since racial preferences were outlawed at public universities in California and Texas, the news on minority admissions at the elite public universities has been uniformly bleak. African-American, Latino, and Native-American admissions plunged among undergraduate institutions, and graduate schools saw even larger drops. Some conservatives have pointed out that the declines are proof of how deeply racial preferences had become embedded, but most Americans look at the declines with dismay: majorities don't like racial preferences, but they don't want all-white universities either.

Nathan Glazer, writing recently in The New Republic, argued that there is an irreconcilable conflict between principle (not judging people by skin color) and practicality (getting a racially diverse student body). In a reversal of his earlier view, Glazer now says we must resort to distasteful means in order to avoid distasteful ends (a "whiteout"). Some other conservatives fear that the dramatic decline in minority admissions will lead universities to abandon the use of standardized tests like the SAT and LSAT -- and that we should stick with racial preferences as a small accommodation to racial politics rather than jettison meritocracy altogether.

But are we really faced with such Hobson's choices? What if we devised a system of admissions that was truly just, looking at academic records in the context of obstacles that individuals had overcome? It might not be fair to give Vernon Jordan's offspring a preference because they happen to be black, but why not give a leg up to disadvantaged kids of all colors, when they have done fairly well despite numerous disadvantages? A disproportionate percentage of disadvantaged students are people of color, and surely one of the central reasons minority students as a group do worse on average academically is because they face the additional obstacles that come from economic deprivation. Alas, this won't work, Glazer says: considering merit plus obstacles doesn't yield much racial diversity, "if the studies are to be believed"

Two of the most widely discussed studies of need-based or class-based affirmative action are Harvard professor Thomas Kane's study of undergraduate admissions and University of North Carolina professor Linda Wightman's study of law school admissions. Both are pessimistic about the possibility that class-based preferences -- as defined by such factors as parental income, education, and occupation -- will yield much racial diversity. The problem, they both note, is that while blacks and Hispanics are disproportionately poor, poor and working-class blacks and Hispanics test worse on average than poor and working-class whites and Asians.

Kane and Wightman are correct on this limited point, but they fail to probe why this disparity exists. One important reason is that looking at standard indicators of socioeconomic status (SES) -- income, occupation, and education -- does not fully capture the differences, in the aggregate, between black and white economic status. Three other differences turn out to be important.

One is concentration of poverty. Sociologists know that it is a disadvantage to grow up in a poor family, but a second, independent disadvantage to grow up in neighborhoods with concentrated poverty, because such children often lack positive role models and peer influences. Because of housing discrimination, blacks are much more likely to live in concentrated poverty than whites of equal income. Indeed, one study found that in Los Angeles, affluent blacks making between $75,000 and $100,000 live in neighborhoods with higher mean poverty rates than whites with incomes in the $5,000-$10,000 range.

A second important difference between blacks and whites of the same income level has to do with differences in wealth. While median black family income is on the order of 60 percent of white income, median black net assets are 9 percent that of whites. Middle class blacks earning $45,000-$60,000 annually have a lower net worth on average than whites with incomes between $7,500 and $15,000. Family wealth affects a child's life chances in a number of ways. To take one concrete example, a study reported recently in The Wall Street Journal found that blacks are less likely to take LSAT preparation courses, which run as much as $1,000. For the average black, whose net worth is one-tenth the average white's, the cost of the LSAT course is the equivalent of...