Still from The Skulls.
Three years ago, a major Supreme Court ruling struck down affirmative action in higher education admissions. Well, that is what they would like people to believe. In fact, there are still many preference policies in elite college admissions — especially if the student is rich and White. As the Trump administration continues to campaign against universities it claims are using race-related admissions policies that disadvantage White students, it has been silent about the many ways that White students are granted preferential treatment.
It is not hard to find high-profile examples. By his own admission, President George W. Bush was a C-student at Yale; he liked to remind people that even a C-student can become president. Bush also was a C-student in high school, and his SAT score was below the median for his class at Yale. Why might an academically mediocre student gain admission to an Ivy League university?
Bush had many characteristics that gave him advantages. The most important one is that he was a legacy — his father and grandfather both graduated from Yale. This meant that his chance of admission would be higher than other similar students without legacy status. And because of the history of racial discrimination, White students are more likely to have this type of legacy status.
Another admissions advantage is having a parent willing to make a hefty donation. The father of Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, donated $2.5 million to Harvard in 1998. Kushner was then accepted there, even though reports suggest that he did not have an impressive high school academic record. The economist Raj Chetty and his colleagues found that being from a family in the richest 1 percent increases the odds of a student’s admission to an elite college by 34 percent.
This preference for the very wealthy has clear racial implications. Despite the visibility of a few rich Black celebrities, Black families are significantly underrepresented among the ultra-rich. While about 13 percent of high school students are Black, only 3 percent of the richest 1 percent of families are Black. Meanwhile, about half of high school students are White, but over 80 percent of the richest 1 percent of families are White. The admissions preference for the richest 1 percent functions as a White preference.
There are other policies that serve the same ends. Students at elite colleges aredisproportionately from the Northeast. To diversify their enrollment, elite schools give a preference to applicants from underrepresented states. As one admissions consultant stated, “You have a much better chance of getting in if you’re in a state that might be in a more rural area” rather than a major city. An analysis of data from Brown University found that applicants from the very White states of North Dakota and Montana had an admissions rate more than twice that of applicants from New Jersey, a much more racially diverse state. This kind of preference could have benefited someone like Vice President JD Vance, who may have gained an advantage in admissions to Yale Law School because he is from a small town in Ohio.
Or consider athletic recruiting, which has been called “the biggest form of affirmative action in American higher education.” Elite schools like Harvard recruit for sports such as skiing, sailing, water polo, rowing, squash, fencing, and golf, and the recruited athletes are overwhelmingly wealthy, White students. Elite colleges also rely more heavily on ‘early decision’ admissions programs that require a student applicant to agree to attend the school if accepted. The acceptance rate for such applicants is higher than for regular admissions, and the pool of applications tends to skew White and wealthier. As the journalist Jeffrey Selingo reasons, “Students from upper-middle-class and wealthy families are willing to trade the ability to compare financial aid offers for an increased chance of getting in.”
Using the Supreme Court decision as its guide, Trump’s Justice Department is working to make sure that Black and Hispanic students are extremely underrepresented in elite medical schools. The department claims to be working to prevent the use of “racial proxies”—policies that are race-neutral but that provide a disproportionate benefit to a particular racial group.
Although legacy, donor, geographic, athletic, and early decision admission preferences all tilt in favor of White applicants, the Justice Department does not have an interest in preventing the use of these proxies for White students. It only has an interest in proxies for Black and Hispanic students and in blocking these students’ admission into elite education. In other words, the Trump Justice Department is practicing racial discrimination, not fighting it.
This originally appeared on CEPR.
