The Education Trust’s just-released report on higher-education access for minority and low-income students raises a number of important issues about what role, if any, colleges and universities should play in creating a “level playing field” for members of underrepresented groups. Some believe that institutions of higher learning should be in the vanguard of recruiting and retaining underrepresented high-school students to create a more egalitarian society.
In the war against racial preferences, even many conservatives have embraced a race-neutral version of this egalitarian argument, asserting that affirmative action should be allowed on the basis of economic class instead of race or ethnicity.
But I think this argument ultimately fails. “Equal opportunity” is an incredibly vague concept that — even if definable — could not be achieved without a massive amount of governmental intrusion in the economy and society. There is no way for the government to decree that, everything else being equal, a child born to an unwed single teenage mother will have the same life opportunities as a child born to two upper-middle-class professionals who can afford to pay for an elite prep school.
Instead of fighting for a race-neutral, “compassionate conservative” version of affirmative action, conservatives and libertarians should instead defend merit-based admissions. And conservatives can greatly increase their credibility in defending the concept of merit by pro-actively opposing separate admissions standards for athletes, legacies, and in-state residents.