oh, I recognize that schools have racist admissions policies. And I sympathize with the Asian struggle to get this issue publicized. But it's used as a wedge by racist whites to further marginalize all people of color to solidify a hiearchy among them. We are seeing the fruits of this division as Asian-Americans are expressing their hostility to black admission into elite schools when instead they should be attacking legacy admissions:
The Trump administration will be taking aim at affirmative action programs it believes "discriminate against white applicants," reports
The New York Times. But if the Justice Department blames affirmative action for the fact that it's difficult to get into a selective college, its outrage may be misplaced. Undergraduate populations at top schools are not that diverse. In fact, they are strikingly homogeneous: Largely upper-middle-class or rich.
In short, it's wealthy kids, not minorities, who are disproportionately represented at colleges, and elite institutions especially.
"At 38 colleges in America, including five in the Ivy League —
Dartmouth,
Princeton,
Yale,
Penn and
Brown — more students came from the top one percent of the income scale than from the entire bottom 60 percent," reports
The New York Times. It also points out that, at every one of the top 65 U.S. universities, the median parent income is over $100,000. That figure ranges from $272,000 at Washington University in St. Louis to $104,900 at UCLA.
That's why Richard V. Reeves, author of the new book "
Dream Hoarders" and a senior fellow in
Economic Studies and co-director of the
Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institute, tells
CNBC Make It that "the affirmative action we should be most worried about is the one for legacies."
And it is fallacious to assume elite school admission is strictly a grades based meritocracy. For public state schools it should be, but not for the Ivy Leagues who have the luxury of selecting for a student body that reflects what they consider diverse.