While most Americans applaud the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision striking down racial preferences in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, they also support affirmative action for economically disadvantaged students of all races. Jason Riley’s column “‘Economic Affirmative Action’ Won’t Work” (Upward Mobility, April 23), however, raises a legitimate question: Would affirmative action for working-class students—an approach I encourage in my new book “Class Matters”—lead to academic “mismatch” for underprepared students and violate principles of merit?
In its defense of racial preferences in the litigation, Harvard also claimed that economic affirmative action was an unworkable alternative because it would reduce standards. But simulations that Duke University economist Peter Arcidiacono and I conducted as expert witnesses for Students for Fair Admissions showed that the mean SAT of students admitted through economic affirmative action at Harvard would be at the 98th percentile. As Justice Neil Gorsuch noted in his concurring opinion, class-based affirmative action “would barely affect the academic credentials of each incoming class.”
Moreover, most fair-minded people recognize that in assessing a student’s potential, it would be absurd to ignore whether a 1400 SAT score was achieved by a pupil who attended poorly funded schools and worked two jobs after school to help his family make ends meet or by one who had been given everything in life. Considering academic achievement in light of hurdles surmounted is the best measure of true merit.
