President Donald Trump’s administration is scrutinizing higher education. Last week, the White House issued a memorandum requiring all universities receiving federal funds to submit admissions data on all applicants to the Department of Education. The goal is to enforce the 2023 Supreme Court decision that ended race-based affirmative action.
Days before the memo was released, Columbia and Brown agreed to share their admissions data with the administration, broken down by race, grade point average, and standardized test scores. The administration suspects that universities are using “racial proxies” to get around the ban on race-based admissions. The Department of Education is expected to build a database of the admissions data and make it available to parents and students.
Amid this increased federal scrutiny, an alternative idea from Richard Kahlenberg, director of the American Identity Project for the Progressive Policy Institute, is gaining attention. Kahlenberg, who testified in the Supreme Court cases against Harvard and UNC, advocates for class-based affirmative action instead of race-based admissions. He argues that this approach will yield more economically and racially equitable results.
Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with Kahlenberg about how he contends with the consequences of helping gut race-based affirmative action, why he believes class-based affirmative action is the path forward, and if his own argument may come in the crosshairs of a Trump administration eager to stamp out all forms of affirmative action.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
You’re the director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute. I would take it to mean that you are a progressive.
It’s complicated these days. I’m left of center. I think of myself more as liberal than progressive.
I ask because you testified as an expert witness for the plaintiffs in the case Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College. This is the case that essentially gutted race-based affirmative action. It doesn’t sound like a progressive, or even a left-of-center, position. What was going on? Explain what you were thinking.
I’ve long been a supporter of racial diversity in colleges. I think that’s enormously important, but I’ve been troubled that elite colleges were racially integrated, but economically segregated.
I think there’s a better way of creating racial diversity — a more liberal way, if you will — which is to give low-income and economically disadvantaged students of all races a leg up in the admissions process in order to create both racial and economic diversity.
What was the data that you looked at that led you to believe that? Were primarily wealthy Black and Hispanic students benefiting from affirmative action?
There’d been a number of studies over the years that had come to that conclusion, including from supporters of race-based affirmative action. Then, in the litigation, further evidence came out. At Harvard, 71 percent of the Black and Hispanic students came from the most socioeconomically privileged 20 percent of the Black and Hispanic population nationally.
Now, to be clear, the white and Asian students were even richer. But for the most part, this was not a program that was benefiting working-class and low-income students.
Alright, so the Supreme Court in 2023 hands down this decision that says, essentially, we’re done with race-based affirmative action. Was there a difference in how progressives and conservatives interpreted the Supreme Court ruling?
Most mainstream conservatives have always said they were opposed to racial preferences, but of course, they were for economic affirmative action. But now we have some on the extreme, including the Trump administration, saying that economic affirmative action is also illegal if part of the rationale for the policy is seeking to increase racial diversity.
What do you make of that? That was your team once upon a time, right?
Well, I think it’s troubling when people shift the goalposts. In a number of the Supreme Court concurring opinions in the case, conservatives said that economic affirmative action made a lot of sense. Justice [Neil] Gorsuch, for example, said if Harvard got rid of legacy preferences and instead gave economic affirmative action, that would be perfectly legal. And now some extremists are shifting their position and saying they’re opposed to any kind of affirmative action.
Are you surprised by that shift?
I’m not surprised. I’m confident, however, that a majority of the US Supreme Court won’t go that far. The Supreme Court, to some degree, looks to public opinion. Racial preferences were always unpopular. But economic affirmative action is broadly supported by the public.
The Supreme Court has had two cases come before it, subsequent to the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision. One involved a challenge to class-based affirmative action at Thomas Jefferson High School in Northern Virginia, and the other involved an attack on a similar class-based affirmative action program at the Boston exam schools, like Boston Latin. In both cases, the Supreme Court said we’re not gonna hear those cases over the vehement dissent of a couple of extremely conservative justices. So I’m fairly confident that the Supreme Court will not go down the path of striking down economic-based preferences.
What do you make of this move by the Trump administration to ask colleges for data?
I’m of two minds about it. I do think transparency is good in higher education. These institutions are receiving lots of taxpayer money. We want to make sure they’re following the Supreme Court ruling, which said you can’t use race.
Having said that, I’m quite nervous about how the Trump administration will use the data, because if a college discloses the average SAT scores and grades by race of applicants, of those admitted, and then those enrolled, one of two things can be going on. One is that the university’s cheating and they’re using racial preferences, and that would be a violation of the law.
The other possibility is that they did shift to economic affirmative action, which is perfectly legal.
And because Black and Hispanic students are disproportionately low income and working class, they will disproportionately benefit from a class-based affirmative action program. And so the average SAT score is going to look somewhat lower. I’m worried that the Trump administration will go after both race-based and class-based affirmative action.
Because class-based affirmative action still might mean a college is admitting more Black and Hispanic students. And what the Trump administration seems to have the issue with is that fact.
Yes. Increasingly, that’s what it looks like. As long as the Trump administration was focused on counting race and deciding who gets ahead, they had the American public on their side. But Americans also support the idea of racially integrated student bodies, they just don’t like racial preferences as the means for getting there. So, if Trump says, no matter how you achieve this racial diversity, I’m just opposed to racial diversity, he’ll have lost the public. And I don’t think he will be consistent with the legal framework under Students for Fair Admissions, either.
Well, I think he ought to care if he cares about the future of his political party. Because under class-based affirmative action, it is true that Black and Hispanic students will disproportionately benefit, but it will also benefit white working-class students. And those are the students who are coming from families that form the base of the Republican Party. So I think it would be a big mistake if the Trump administration were to really push hard on that angle.