Class Matters
The Fight to Get Beyond Race Preferences, Reduce Inequality, and Build Real Diversity at America’s Colleges
Richard D. Kahlenberg
The dirty secret of elite higher education in the United States is that the focus on racial diversity provides cover for an admissions system that mostly benefits the wealthy and shuts out talented working-class students. The framework of race-based preferences—a well-intentioned program that is deeply unpopular—disproportionately helps upper-middle-class students of color, helps justify a system of legacy preferences for the well-off, and pits working-class people of different races against one another. Major public and private universities have clung to the status quo anyway, because doing so is easier financially than helping disadvantaged students who require financial aid to enroll. These institutions act as if the predominant version of affirmative action is the only way to promote racial diversity, but that simply isn’t true. It’s just cheaper for them.
Class Matters: The Fight to Get Beyond Race Preferences, Reduce Inequality, and Build Real Diversity at America’s Colleges lays out a different vision. While there has been widespread alarm that racial diversity will plummet now that the Supreme Court has disallowed racial preferences in college admissions decisions, it doesn’t have to be that way. Ironically, in fact, that decision will likely lead to a liberal public policy result – a new robust set of affirmative efforts to enroll low-income and working-class students, a disproportionate share of whom are Black and Latino. In the aftermath of this historic decision on race, upending a half century of precedent, Class Matters lays out a positive agenda for the next stage of elite college admissions that produces economic and racial diversity alike.
Published by Public Affairs
Praise for Class Matters
A spirited argument for a liberal politics of class rather than race…Serious, measured and fair-minded.―New York Times
A solid case for building diverse student bodies with closer attention to financial need than to ethnic background.―Kirkus
A provocative call to reconsider how diversity in higher education can be achieved.―Publishers Weekly
Asians aren’t ‘diverse’ enough, poor whites’ ‘underrepresentation’ is irrelevant, admitting Black corporate executives’ children is ‘levelling the playing field.’ In university admissions, the buzzwords are as frayed as their rationales. Class Matters shows where we have gone wrong so far, and how we will get to justice, equality, and even diversity for real.―John McWhorter, professor of linguistics, Columbia University, and weekly New York Times writer
For decades, Kahlenberg has been the country’s leading proponent of ‘class not race’ in debates over college admissions. The latest iteration of his argument, Class Matters, is characteristically forthright, accessible, and informative. Anyone deeply interested in ongoing struggles over the selection of candidates for seats in the nation’s most selective colleges and universities must come to grips with Kahlenberg.―Randall Kennedy, Michael R. Klein Professor, Harvard Law School
How the promise of the civil rights revolution was betrayed for half a century by a system of cosmetic racial preferences that mask growing economic inequality is a tragic and fascinating story. No one is better qualified to tell it than Richard Kahlenberg, who has devoted his career as a thinker and activist to the dream of a color-blind, egalitarian America.―Michael Lind, author of The New Class War
Exceptionally strategic in a Supreme Court case that ended racial affirmative action in college and university admissions, Kahlenberg joined a pantheon of legends—Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Bayard Rustin—and found common ground with conservatives to create social and economic class admissions.―John C. Brittain, UDC School of Law, and former chief counsel, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights
For several decades, Kahlenberg has been one of America’s most widely respected, original, and consequential thinkers on education, housing, workers’ rights, and affirmative action. Class Matters is his semi-autobiographical magnum opus. This engagingly written book is the definitive insider’s account of how elite colleges’ race-based affirmative action policies camouflaged extreme rates of rich-kid admissions, clashed with public opinion, and crashed in the Supreme Court. Even better, Kahlenberg offers an authoritative, evidence-based roadmap for turning top universities into genuinely diverse communities in which low-income and working-class students of every demographic description are truly well-represented and respected. This magnificent book is not only a must-read; it’s the text of the debate on the past, present, and future of affirmative action in America.―John J. DiIulio Jr., Frederic Fox Leadership Professor, University of Pennsylvania
Kahlenberg has been manning the lonely ramparts of class-based affirmative action for decades. The world has finally caught up with him now that race-based affirmative action has been struck down by the Supreme Court. In his indispensable new book, Kahlenberg lucidly surveys the history of the race-based approach and explains how class-based affirmative action can and must take its place. Liberals and conservatives alike should read this book as a guide to what might come next.―Ruy Teixeira, coauthor of The Emerging Democratic Majority and senior fellow, American Enterprise Institute
Class Matters is a must-read for anyone who believes diversity should be more than skin deep. With the Supreme Court’s decision ending race-based admissions programs, Kahlenberg suggests that social and economic class can be barriers to equal opportunity—regardless of race. His book details ways universities can alleviate the barriers to success they cause.―Linda Chavez, chair, Center for Equal Opportunity
