In the previous post, I blogged about a New York Times story highlighting Chicago’s new plan to consider social and economic factors while assigning students to magnet and selective government schools.
The Chronicle of Higher Education cites a new study that purportedly shows the main reason students quit college is financial. In this context, the Chronicle asks scholars and experts whether schools should admit students based on socioeconomic status rather than skin color.
The Center for Equal Opportunity‘s Roger Clegg says no. “[I]f people are dropping out of college for financial reasons, that certainly would argue for better need-based aid for those admitted,” but not for preferences.
Diversity proponents tend to focus on skin color, but Clegg notes that socioeconomic preferences may provide the so-called educational benefits schools seek, but “without the ugliness, divisiveness, and myriad other costs” of racial preferences.
Contrast Clegg’s answer with NAACP chairman Julian Bond’s, who wants everyone to know that poverty is not a proxy for race. He supports socioeconomic considerations in admissions, but believes the government should retain racial preferences and discrimination.
Oddly, Bond evokes the murder of Bill Cosby’s son to bolster his support for racial preferences and to show “how feeble the Cosbys’s great wealth was in protecting their son against this ugly virus.”
Is Bond saying that discriminating against whites and lowering standards for blacks protects blacks from violent crime committed by “racist” whites? Interesting, since most crimes of violence against blacks are committed by other blacks.
Bond’s bringing up the murder of Cosby’s son in such a context is irrelevant, disingenuous, puzzling, and nutty.
Pope Center director George Leef believes admitting students based on socioeconomic status could raise the drop-out rate.
“Students who struggle in college because they can’t handle the combination of course work and part-time employment will not have an easier time if they’re enrolled at a more-selective institution, where the work is usually more difficult and the costs greater…Class-based affirmative action merely shuffles a small number of students from poorer families up into more-prestigious colleges, where they receive an education that isn’t necessarily any better than they’d have received elsewhere.”
Lee Bollinger, former president of the University of Michigan, parrots the pro-preferences line, but attempts to obscure his skin color-diversity obsession.
“One thing I’m concerned about is that we not be forced to make a false choice between admission policies that focus on wealth and class and those that seek to achieve greater diversity based on race and ethnicity,” he said. We want our colleges and universities to reflect many kinds of diversity, and we cannot assume that focusing on one will address the other.”
Bollinger was the defendant in two racial preferences cases that reached the Supreme Court. Michigan awarded minority students applying to the school an automatic 20 points just for being minorities (Gratz v. Bollinger). The court ruled this practice unconstitutional.
Calling Bollinger’s remarks insincere, plaintiff Jennifer Gratz said that during the trial, he tried his best to characterize her as a “rich white girl,” although she says she grew up in a low to moderate income home.
“I don’t believe anything will ever reach the level of importance that racial diversity does in the mind of Lee Bollinger.”
To quote a Supreme Court justice, I concur.
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