How Higher Ed Can Stop Affirmative Action for Rich White People - Opinion Piece

Anthony P. Carnevale, Peterch Schmidt, and Jeff Strohl write: The Covid-19 pandemic, and the resulting economic crash, has laid bare the race and class injustice in American society. Higher education perpetuated society’s inequalities and divisions by sorting the children of white and wealthy families into well-financed, prestigious institutions, while steering the children of the rest — should they go to college at all — into nonselective institutions too poor to ensure that most of their students graduate. Under pressure from political and market forces, and severe financial strain, the nonselective sector adopted a host of bad habits, such as heavy dependence on tuition, that have compromised some colleges’ ability to survive this crisis. In other words, we set ourselves up for this.