Class Affirmative Action Is Worse

Against preferences for the poor

With the official end of affirmative action in college admissions, there has been increasing discussion about the possibility of institutions using class-based preferences.

Here’s a piece in The New York Times telling Democrats to take the opportunity provided by SFFA v Harvard to go and win back white working class votes. I was at an event at UATX in Dallas a few weeks ago, and after a panel on diversity there were many in the audience who were supportive of the same idea. Support for class-based affirmative action has become a way to signal the belief that the woke stuff has gone too far, but I’m the kind of person who acknowledges that the world is an unfair place and we should try to do something about it.

This is a remarkably terrible idea. First, I doubt the premise that if two individuals have similar academic credentials, the one who grew up poor should be assumed to have more potential. As Gregory Clark and others have shown, there is such a thing as regression to the mean within families. Knowledge about your parents and grandparents can help predict things about you, even when we have individualized information. If they both have a perfect SAT score, I’ll take Einstein’s son over that of a janitor. This might make the argument for class-based preferences that if anything go in the opposite direction, favoring the wealthy. The counterargument that it’s more impressive for a poor person to accomplish something isn’t obviously absurd, but it ignores the predictive power of heredity.

Moreover, whatever advantages you got from your family background will still be there once you graduate from college. Socialists like to point out that Jeff Bezos got a $245,000 loan from his parents, without realizing that it actually proves the opposite of what they’re trying to argue. His talents may have been wasted if he came from a poorer background, and the creation of Amazon only demonstrates the explosive power of the concentration of capital and natural talent within the same families, even at a modest scale ($245,000 isn’t that much relative to what the company is now worth!).

George W. Bush is another example of class privilege that people bring up. But whatever you think of his policies, winning the presidency twice is quite the accomplishment, so it turned out that he had a lot more potential than what he showed in the first forty years or so of his life. This could’ve been predicted from the biographies of his father and grandfather.

Regardless, there’s a more fundamental issue here, which is that a class-based system will, like racial preferences, require a bureaucratic army committed to social engineering to implement. The problem would probably be worse, since it’s relatively easy to measure someone’s race. Inevitable questions arise in a class-based system, like should you count income or wealth more? Should you favor poor kids of highly educated parents or rich kids born to those without college degrees? How do you guard against the Elizabeth Warren problem? If you thought it was easy to game race-based affirmative action, you haven’t seen anything yet.

Richard Kahlenberg is an advocate for class-based preferences, and his main argument for their necessity is the fact that people from wealthy backgrounds are more likely to get into elite schools.

In other words, he’s a gene denier. Even in a world without any social advantages based on class background, you would expect rich kids to be overrepresented at Harvard and UNC because qualities like intelligence and conscientiousness are highly heritable. It’s possible, even likely, that class advantages do exist, but the figure above alone proves absolutely nothing, any more than racial disparities on a standardized test show that it is biased.

Anyone who can write a 1,700-word essay on this topic without acknowledging heredity is either clueless or dishonest. He’s not the type of person you want making public policy, but class-based affirmative action is a way to ensure that he and others like him will have a larger role to play in influencing and running institutions. If they’re making arguments this bad before they even get the world to adopt their preferred system, you can imagine how little sense such experts are going to be making once they have jobs to protect.

The last thing we need is the decline of DEI to be accompanied by the rise of the class warriors. More realistically, DEI wouldn’t be replaced, because it would be the same people in government and private institutions deciding who is a victim and who is an oppressor, and then doling out benefits or inflicting harms on the basis of their judgments. If you think we can have objective social science on whether class-based preferences “work” under those circumstances, you’re very naive.

Finally, class-based preferences are more unjust than racial discrimination. Your race is something that is out of your control, while being poor is mostly a sign of failure. No, not a failure of the child himself, but those who brought him into the world. I want a society that broadly has a pro-natalist and pro-family culture. If you work hard, build a good life for yourself, and contribute towards populating the next generation, that is something we should all applaud. Society should not look at the investments you’ve made in your child and see them as a problem that government policy needs to overcome. Alternatively, a lifetime of bad decision making shouldn’t be something that society is tasked to balance out by hurting others.

I recently saw JFK’s essay to get into Harvard and was touched by it. There is no sense that the accomplishments of his family were something he should be ashamed of.

I wonder what he would think about our modern assumption that he should have gone through life feeling guilty about the fact that his dad was a successful businessman instead of a pimp. As rich and advantaged as he may have been, Kennedy had a sense of noblesse oblige and went out of his way to serve heroically in the Second World War. I don’t think this is unrelated to the general orientation of the culture of the time, in which the intergenerational transmission of wealth and status was seen as legitimate, being the just desserts of a life well-lived.

I wouldn’t take this argument too far and argue for government policy to advantage the wealthy. But laws shouldn’t try to stop private institutions from doing so. The state itself, meanwhile, should set standards and otherwise remain neutral with regard to the backgrounds of its citizens.

Whether this makes sense to you or not depends on whether you see the family or the individual as the relevant unit of analysis. The desire for a world in which children are free from the positive or negative effects of the attributes and decisions of their parents is in direct contradiction to other values. And to correct for the “injustice” of different familial backgrounds, society must by necessity empower government bureaucrats, supposed experts, and other social engineers to realize its vision. We’ve already been down that path.