Targeting poverty/income as oppose to race seems like such a no brainer to me. It still solves the same problem, except that it wouldn’t ever discriminate and if there was equal equity in poverty you’d expect equal equity in targeting it.
I'd guess it would help lots of low-income Asian students. There are so many of them with pretty good test scores and grades. They might end up swamping the affirmative action beneficiaries under a socioeconomic program. That would be good for some types of equity but it wouldn't "solve the same problem" as affirmative action.
What’s wrong with using measures of merit of the applicant? GPA, standardized tests, application including essays, letters of recommendation, etc. The desire to find ways to improve upon direct measures and the hubris to believe placing these thumbs on the scales will make things globally better is somewhere between puzzling and mystifying to me.
Having a freshman class filled with people who’s parents wanted their kids to get into a good school isn’t the goal. Standardized tests for example are surprisingly gamble especially when you consider things like bribery.
Elite collages for example want their student body to look a specific way. One slice for ultra wealthy, one slice for foreigners, another slice for XYZ.
Interesting - what is the goal according to you ?
Goodhart’s Law[0]
More broadly, I absolutely praise and reward my kids when they do things that I believe are worthy of such feedback. Sometimes that's for achievement; sometimes that's for effort. It's part of the feedback process inherent in raising children; if you have a different approach that you prefer for your children, I don't have any objections to you using your approach.
Does anyone think another book report on Anne of Green Gables is useful?
When I was doing alumni interviews I reserved the top rating exclusively for applicants that had ever had a real job. Not three weeks allegedly building houses in Central America, not an internship for well connected teens, only things like flipping burgers. That’s meritorious.
Race is massively harder and more biased. You’re black = assumed excess difficulty in life? What about white but just came from a refugee camp? What if your family has been poor for many generations?
There were reasons to say a black person’s life at $50k/y income is harder than a white person’s, and the same with boys vs girls, but things have changed quite a bit. Specifically society has mixed a lot more, immigration and interracial children have significantly changed the landscape, to say nothing of the fact that girls outnumber boys in college!
I think the hurdle should be high for including adjustments to the applicant’s demonstrated ability, and looking at a year or two of tax returns isn’t going to give you a reliable picture. I have a deferred compensation system available (and I’m just a schmoe employee). If it was critical to their application, I could make those two years of tax returns look however I needed.
This means you can easily fill these schools 100% with white students if you use only income as the proxy.
I personally believe the only fair course of action is admission by merit and then attack anyone racial disparities seem in each years admission at a different place in the pipeline.
California's constitution banned affirmative action in the 90s and huge, well-endowed facilities like Berkeley have been unable to remedy their plummeting minority enrollment: https://news.berkeley.edu/story_jump/end-of-affirmative-acti...
Having spoken to some folks at (admittedly smaller) universities that work with such problems, substitute methods like income and zipcode are simply not as effective – not by a long shot.
Some wealthy friends we met at the playground moved to a (snazzy new) condo at the corner of a low-income census block for a year or two so they could get their kid an advantage in the SF kindergarten lottery, successfully getting them into their first-choice school on the other side of town. Then after the kid was enrolled for a few months, they moved to the (higher-income) neighborhood where the school is located.
Being nominally in a census block with slightly higher school lottery priority is a well-understood perk of some of these fancy new condo buildings, and may even drive some amount of gentrification.
(That doesn’t necessarily mean that advantaging people from lower income neighborhoods in school choice isn’t helpful, but it’s pretty hard to set up systems that actually measure what they’re intending to measure.)