Donald Trump has opened a new, terribly ill-advised battle in his war on affirmative action. His target is no longer just racial preferences, an issue where Trump had strong public support. Instead, Trump’s new enemy appears to be racial diversity itself—something most Americans support in educational settings when it is achieved by giving a break to the economically disadvantaged of all races. A Trump Department of Justice memorandum, for instance, has declared that “criteria like socioeconomic status, first-generation status, or geographic diversity must not be used” if a university’s goal is to further racial integration on campus.
Given the president’s appalling history on matters of race, this development, while troubling, is not particularly surprising. What is mystifying is that a pillar of the higher education establishment recently went along with Trump. Earlier this month, the College Board, which administers the SAT, announced it would stop making a tool called Landscape available to colleges, which is designed to help identify high-achieving low-income students of all races. The organization cited as its reason the way in which “federal and state policy continues to evolve around how institutions use demographic and geographic information in admissions.”
The decision represents the worst kind of capitulation. Landscape, as the College Board noted, “was intentionally developed without the use or consideration of data on race or ethnicity.” Instead, it allowed colleges to consider a student’s achievement in light of the socioeconomic makeup of his or her neighborhood and high school. Neighborhood factors included median family income, typical educational attainment, the share of families headed by a single parent, and crime rates. High school factors included the share of students eligible for subsidized lunch, the proportion taking AP exams, and the average SAT score. The idea was that if a student does pretty well academically despite these educational challenges, they have something special to offer.
