Wake Forest University has announced that it will continue its “early action” admissions program, but with this twist — it will be available only to applicants who would be the first generation in their family to attend college. If one of your parents went to college, you’re not eligible. That is not racial discrimination on its face, but it seems contrived to have a “disparate impact” to aid minority students. Is it legal? If so, is it a good idea?
In today’s Martin Center article, Dan Way looks into the Wake Forest program.
He writes,
The value comes from ensuring student-population diversity in the wake of the Supreme Court decision. As Forbes put it in a recent article, “Wake Forest, this year, has allowed only first-generation students, whose parents did not graduate from college, to apply early action. That was a particularly elegant way of addressing the desire for campus diversity on the heels of the Supreme Court decision striking down affirmative actions.”
Edward Blum, who masterminded the cases in which the Supreme Court recently struck down racial preferences in college admissions, doesn’t see this approach as legally actionable.
I think he’s right. The problem here isn’t legal, but rather that this gambit perpetuates the notion that going to an elite (or at least pretty selective) school like Wake Forest is a really big deal, inducing students who get in early to forget about “lesser” schools. It just isn’t true that going to Wake Forest means getting a superior education and enhanced job opportunities.