Income-based diversity push falls short at elite colleges

By Clarence Page, Tribune Media Services on Jan 13, 2013

Some 70 percent of gifted low-income students came from 15 large metropolitan areas, the study found. Most attend highly respected public magnet schools where elite colleges tend to have long-established pipelines of contacts with high school counselors and other informal talent scouts.

Students at such schools also are more likely to talk about and apply to elite colleges as an option than students in schools, families or communities who view such colleges as faraway havens for snooty rich kids.

"The students whom (colleges) see are the students who apply," Hoxby told NPR science editor Shankar Vedantam in a recent interview. "And if a student doesn't apply to any selective college or university, it's impossible for admissions staff to see that they are out there."

As remedies, colleges need to broaden their searches, publicity and outreach to more cities and smaller towns. The high schools and local communities also owe it to their promising students to improve their own outreach.

The success or failure of income-based outreach by elite colleges is important to the rest of us, too.

With the Supreme Court looking at the future of affirmative action by universities, income-based diversity efforts in any form excite those of us who have been looking for alternatives to race-based affirmative action.

The Harvard model strives to offer the merit-based model that critics of affirmative action have idealized as a return to merit-based academic rewards.

"The Hoxby-Avery study offers further evidence that universities care more about racial diversity than economic diversity," said Richard Kahlenberg,senior fellow at The Century Foundation and a long-time advocate of class-based outreach. "They don't seem to have the same appetite to go out and recruit low-income students of all races."

Or to paraphrase the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., we need to judge students, not by the color of their skin but by the content of their academic achievement.

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E-mail Clarence Page at cpage(at)tribune.com.