Replacing race-based preferences in college admissions with socioeconomic preferences is a bad idea.

It's also probably illegal.

Yesterday, I wrote about the Trump administration’s requirement that colleges and universities disclose information relevant to whether they are discriminating on the basis of race in admissions. In that post, I discussed the weak objections to this requirement that proponents of race discrimination have raised. In this post, I want to discuss the reaction of Richard Kahlenberg to the order, as reported by the New York Times.

Kahlenberg takes what I’ll call a middle-ground position on Trump’s reporting requirements. He says he favors its transparency. However, he faults the order for not requiring colleges and universities to report “socioeconomic” data about their applicants.

This objection is consistent with the position Kahlenberg has taken for 30 years, namely that colleges and universities should replace racial preferences with preferences for applicants from low income and working-class families. I critiqued that proposal in this 1996 Washington Post op-ed.

For decades, Kahlenberg’s approach to preferences gained little or no traction. However, the Supreme Court’s decision in the Harvard case that race-based preferences are unlawful has revived Kahlenberg’s approach as an alternative form of preferences. This is not surprising. Given disparities in the economic status of blacks and whites, socioeconomic preferences are a serviceable, albeit imperfect, means of preferring blacks.

The Harvard decision nodded in the direction of preferring some applicants with the kind of socioeconomic background Kahlenberg finds admission-worthy. It did so by stating that colleges can consider personal statements by black applicants about how they confronted and overcame social barriers associated with their race.

But such consideration entails a case-by-case analysis, not a system of preferences for the poor. What Kahlenberg has advocated, as I understand it, is different. He favors a “program of preferences” (as he put it here) under which all applicants of low socioeconomic status are, in effect, presumed to have faced barriers to the kind of academic success better-off applicants have attained.

In this system, low socioeconomic status would replace race as the basis excusing weak credentials such as relatively low SAT scores. In short, Kahlenberg wants to give a “leg up” to “poor and working-class kids,” as a class.

Would this be lawful? Yes, in theory. Colleges have broad discretion as to whom they admit, as long as they don’t take race into account. If they wanted to, they could use a lottery to determine who is admitted.

However, the Harvard decision states that colleges cannot do indirectly what they are barred from doing directly. Thus, they cannot switch from a system of preferring blacks to a system of preferring low-income applicants if their purpose is to favor blacks indirectly.

Were colleges to switch now from race-based preferences to socioeconomic ones, it would certainly be for the purpose of preferring blacks. If colleges genuinely wanted to implement a program of preferences for poor and working class kids, they would have done it long ago. They would not have waited for their first-choice method of admitting large numbers of blacks to be struck down by the Supreme Court before resorting to an alternative method of accomplishing, or at least approaching, the same result.

There are good reasons why colleges have not adopted a program of preferences for the poor as a means of admitting large numbers of blacks. Under the current system of preferences, colleges by-and-large admit the black applicants with the best objective qualifications for the school — i.e., the best grades and SAT scores. These applicants tend to be middle class blacks. Although most of them don’t possess the strong objective qualifications of whites and Asian-Americans who are admitted (and many who are rejected), they are the pick of the black applicant pool.

Under a program of preferences for the poor, many of these blacks would be replaced by blacks who, as a class, have lesser credentials — in other words, blacks who are less well prepared to succeed at the college in question. Thus, the distressingly large gap between mean test scores of blacks and whites at elite universities would become even more pronounced.

The existing gap already works to the disadvantage of many black students. They end up attending colleges where they are unlikely to excel, or even succeed. Absent race-based preferences, they would attend institutions where they have a good chance of thriving. This harsh reality is known as “mismatch.”

A program of preferences based on socioeconomic status would exacerbate mismatch. It should summarily be rejected.