Here’s why real diversity should focus on class — not race

I’ve spent my career as a center-left thinker and writer, working with people like former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio to help promote school integration and Keith Ellison and the late John Lewis to strengthen organized labor. So why did I agree to join a conservative group, Students for Fair Admissions, in its lawsuits against Harvard and the University of North Carolina in cases that enabled the Supreme Court to bring an end to racial preferences in 2023?

As I outline in my new book, Class Matters: The Fight to Get Beyond Race Preferences, Reduce Inequality, and Build Real Diversity at America’s Colleges, I testified as an expert witness that racial and economic diversity benefits students, but there is a much better way to accomplish these goals than through racial preferences. 

Universities, I testified, should consider ending preferences for the wealthy and instead give an admissions break to economically disadvantaged students of all races, a substantial share of whom would, in fact, end up being Black and Hispanic.

I’d long argued that this approach could work, but I became even more convinced once I had a chance to peek inside the files at Harvard and UNC and see how the admissions process worked.  

Harvard and UNC claimed that the only way they could create racially diverse campuses was to provide racial preferences, but admissions data suggested the real issue here was class and alumni-status.

Indeed, at Harvard, for instance, their focus on race rather than class resulted in a student body in which nearly 75% of Black and Hispanic students came from the richest 20% of Black and Hispanic students nationally. This outcome is the exact opposite of what the rhetoric of proponents of racial preference programs would suggest. 

Harvard claimed they believed in racial justice, but evidence revealed that it routinely rated Asian American students lower on their personal score which was meant to capture qualities like “integrity,” “courage,” and “empathy.” 

Harvard and higher education scholars predicted that a ban on racial preferences would be “catastrophic” for racial diversity. Harvard said the Black share of its student body would fall from 14% to 6%, and an amicus brief from liberal arts colleges predicted Black representation would drop to just 2.1 percent.

But they were wrong. While some colleges did see large declines in racial diversity, many showed that it was possible to preserve diversity despite the Supreme Court’s decision. At Harvard, the share of Black students did not decline to 6 percent or 2 percent. Instead, the figure reported was 14%, a modest decrease from the previous year, as gauged by updated measurements Hispanic representation actually grew from 14% to 16%.

Some professors predicted there would be a lot of anger and backlash following a negative Supreme Court decision on racial preferences, similar to public reaction to the Supreme Court’s decision striking down Roe v. Wade. 

When I spoke on college campuses, virtually everyone appeared to be for racial preferences. Middlebury students told me they would suffer “social death” if they raised criticisms about affirmative action policies. But when the Supreme Court ruled against racial preferences, the vast majority of Americans agreed with the decision. The truth was, my fellow Democrats were on the wrong side of public opinion.

Because many universities succeeded in preserving racial diversity when they had predicted a disastrous decline, some conservatives have questioned whether universities are cheating. University admissions procedures are notoriously opaque, so it is hard to know for sure. 

Some universities may in fact be breaking the law by using student essays about race to apply covert racial preferences in a manner not intended by the Supreme Court. 

But there is also some evidence that a number of universities have adopted an economic need-based  approach to affirmative action that could help explain the high racial diversity numbers. Around the time Students for Fair Admission filed the suit against Harvard, only 7 percent of Harvard’s class was made up of first-generation college students; by 2024, that share had tripled to 21%.  

The University of Virginia adopted new financial aid programs and partnerships with high schools and saw their share of students eligible for federal Pell Grants increase from 14% five years earlier to 24%. 

At Duke, the share of Pell students doubled in just two years, from 11% to 22%. Dartmouth said it increased its share of first-generation college students to a “record-setting level,” and its share of Pell Grant recipients increased five percentage points in a single year to an “all-time high.” 

Efforts to address economic challenges receive much greater support from the public than racial preferences. Yet in a recent “Dear Colleague” letter, the Trump Administration’s Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights said it would target for punishment race-neutral programs if part of the goal was to “increase racial diversity.” That’s a position the U.S. Supreme Court has never taken — and one the public does not necessarily support.  

Richard D. Kahlenberg is Director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute and author of Class Matters: The Fight to Get Beyond Race Preferences, Reduce Inequality, and Build Real Diversity at America’s Colleges (PublicAffairs/Hachette).