CLASS MATTERS

How a new class-based approach to college admissions can produce economic and racial diversity alike and greater fairness.

For decades America's colleges and universities have been working to increase racial diversity. But they have been using the wrong approach, as Richard Kahlenberg persuasively shows in his highly personal and deeply researched book. Kahlenberg makes the definitive case that class disadvantage, rather than race, should be the determining factor for how a broader array of people "get in." While elite universities claim to be on the side of social justice, the dirty secret of higher education is that the perennial focus on racial diversity has provided cover for an admissions system that mostly benefits the wealthy and shuts out talented working-class students. By fixing the class bias in college admissions we can begin to rectify America's skyrocketing economic inequality and class antagonism, giving more people a better place at the table as they move through life and more opportunity to "swim in the river of power." Kahlenberg has long worked with prominent civil rights leaders on housing and school integration. But his recognition of class inequality in American higher education led to his making a controversial decision to go over to the "other side" and provide research and testimony in cases that helped lead to the controversial Supreme Court decision of 2023 that ended racial preferences. That conservative ruling could, Kahlenberg shows, paradoxically have a progressive policy outcome by cutting a new path for economic and racial diversity alike and greater fairness. Richard D. Kahlenberg is director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute and teaches at George Washington University. His work has been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the New Republic, and the Atlantic. He is the author or editor of 18 other books, most recently Excluded: How Snob Zoning, NIMBYism, and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don't See. He lives in Rockville, Maryland.