Affirmative Action for Effort

With their genius for expanding failed government programs, academics have concocted a way to apply affirmative action more expansively. Simply put, Richard D. Kahlenberg, in a June 4, 2010 essay in The Chronicle Review suggests that “universities consider how far a student has come as well as what her raw scores are” on the SAT.

Kahlenberg is a senior fellow at the Century Foundation. The Chronicle Review is published by the Chronicle of Higher Education.

“Thomas J. Espenshade, a professor of sociology at Princeton University, and his co-author Alexandria Walton Radford, found that selective private universities provide a preference that is the equivalent of 310 SAT points for African-Americans, 130 points for low-income students, and 70 points for working-class students,” Kahlenberg writes. “Those findings back up earlier research. William G. Bowen and colleagues found that at selective institutions, among students within a given SAT range, being an underrepresented minority boosts one’s chance of admission by 28 percentage points, but poor students receive ‘essentially no break in the admissions process; they fare neither better nor worse than other applicants.’”

“Anthony P. Carnevale and Stephen J. Rose, in a 2004 Century Foundation study, found that at the most selective 146 institutions, race-based affirmative action tripled the representation of black Hispanic students, while low-income and working-class applicants received no boost at all.”

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.