Set aside, for a moment, the explosive issue of black or brown versus white, which underpins much of the discussion about affirmative action. There are compelling reasons to make it easier for young people of all races from disadvantaged backgrounds to attend college. The University of Texas program at the center of this case did just that. Far from being ruled illegal, it should be embraced and promoted as a practical, merit-based model for other states to copy. Unfortunately, that seems unlikely.
Having lived in the United States for almost thirty years, I am always amazed that Americans persist in believing that this is a land of unparalleled opportunity and social mobility. A bit suspect to begin with, the Horatio Alger story has been transformed, over the decades, into a chronic mental block. To well-educated youngsters from affluent backgrounds who know how to work the system, and even to well-educated immigrants such as myself, this is indeed a land of great opportunity. But for all too many working-class Americans—and a lot of them aren’t members of minority groups—U.S. society is less of a launchpad than a glue trap. With their feet stuck to the ground, they have little prospect of ascending very far.
Almost twenty years ago, when I first pointed to studies suggesting that social mobility in the United States had been greatly exaggerated, and that other advanced countries were more fluid, many of my American friends and colleagues would stare at me blankly. They simply didn’t believe it. But in the past decade or so, many more studies have been done, and almost all of them deliver the same message. Yes, some people start out at the bottom and work their way to the top, but not very many. Statistically speaking, if you are born into a household in the bottom fifth of the income distribution, the probability that by the age of forty you will have reached the top forty per cent of the distribution is about one in six. To put it another way, the odds of you staying where you are, or moving up one just quintile, are about five in six.
In a merit-based system, family ties shouldn’t matter very much. But compared to people in places like Canada and Scandinavia, Americans tend to follow the earnings paths of their parents. On close inspection, the vast majority of highly successful Americans—Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Barack Obama among them—turn out to be the progeny of highly educated professionals. For folks who start out in the cellar of U.S. society, even climbing up to the parlor level is quite a feat, and one that, these days, often demands a college education.
That is why the Texas case is so important. Beginning in 1997, publicly funded colleges in the Lone Star State guaranteed automatic admission to anybody who finished in the top ten per cent of his or her high-school class, thus providing a route to college for talented students who live in all sorts of neighborhoods. Everybody knows that schools in poor areas tend to be worse than their counterparts in rich areas, and that, in general, their students get lower test scores. Here was a way to address that reality, while, at the same time, rewarding merit, ambition, and hard work. The resulting surge in enrollments has caused some problems for colleges such as the University of Texas at Austin, but nobody doubts it has increased the geographic and social diversity of the student body.
The plaintiff, Abigail Noel Fisher, a white woman who was denied admission to U.T. in 2008, claims the Texas admissions policy discriminated against her based on race, violating the Fourteenth’s Amendment’s equal-protection clause. Fisher was not in the top ten per cent of her class. In addition to enacting the ten-per-cent rule, the Texas admissions policy allowed university administrators to consider race—among many other factors, such as socioeconomic background, work experience, and extracurriculars—in looking at applications from students whose grades weren’t good enough to guarantee them a place. Using both approaches, the University of Texas has increased racial diversity; this is what the policy was intended to do, and that’s why the Roberts Court might well strike it down.
After a federal district court and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the policy, Fisher’s lawyers, encouraged by opponents of affirmative action across the country, pursued the case all the way to the Supreme Court. In oral arguments this past October, several conservative Justices lobbed skeptical questions at the lawyers representing the University of Texas and the Obama Administration, which supports affirmative action. As my colleague Jeffrey Toobin pointed out in a post on the oral arguments, the defense team’s replies seemed a bit weak. That was probably inevitable. Ever since the Court’s 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger ruling, written by Sandra Day O’Connor, in which it ruled that race could play a role, but only a limited one, in the admissions policies of public universities, the supporters of affirmative action have been forced onto the defensive, seeking to argue that this or that policy is only partly about addressing racial disparities.
If the Court rules in Fisher’s favor, it could well upend the program guaranteeing places to the top ten per cent of high school students along with proscribing the use of race as a factor in admissions to public colleges across the country. Should that happen, it may make sense for supporters of affirmative action to focus more heavily on broader concerns about social mobility. You don’t have to live in the United States for long to realize that racial discrimination and racial segregation are still the daily reality facing all too many Americans; and, to combat them, I’m all for using traditional arguments wherever possible. But where the forces of conservatism have the upper hand, such as in the Supreme Court, it’s also worth making the case for policies designed to improve the life prospects of all Americans, regardless of race, and to prevent U.S. society from turning into a rigid class system of the sort once associated with Latin America and “old” Europe.
Given the high degree of correlation between socioeconomic status and race, minorities of all types would be among the main beneficiaries of policies aimed at increasing social mobility, but that, to some extent, would be beside the point. The motivating force wouldn’t be righting the wrongs of slavery, or constructing an impregnable Democratic majority in the electorate. It would be a desire to make real the vision of a society in which rewards are based on effort and talent, rather than family connections. And that, surely, should be something that even some conservatives could sign onto.
Original Article
Source: newyorker.com
Author: John Cassidy
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