Class Matters
The Fight to Get Beyond Race Preferences, Reduce Inequality, and Build Real Diversity at America's Colleges
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
A powerful argument for a class-based approach to college admissions that “shows where we have gone wrong so far, and how we will get to justice, equality, and even diversity for real” (John McWhorter)
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this thought-provoking account, journalist Kahlenberg (Excluded) makes a convincing case that college admissions offices should give preferential treatment to applicants who are economically disadvantaged, and that such an approach is more likely than race-based admissions to achieve colleges' stated objective of having a diverse student body. He reached his conclusions before the Supreme Court banned race-conscious admission decisions in the 2023 SFFA v. Harvard and SFFA v. UNC decisions. Kahlenberg, who had a history of working for civil rights, including desegregating schools, was regarded as a turncoat by some on the left for his role as an expert witness in support of Students for Fair Admissions, the conservative group that challenged race-based affirmative action at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. Heeffectively pushes back on that critique by citing research to support his claims; by detailing the views of progressive icons who shared similar opinions, among them Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King Jr.; and by grounding his analysis in profiles of low-income students who struggled at college because of the lack of economic diversity, like Edmund Kennedy, a Black undergrad who felt out of place at Amherst College, where almost all the other students of color came from affluent families. It's a provocative call to reconsider how diversity in higher education can be achieved.
