“Advocating for merit is a political winner,” said Richard D. Kahlenberg, the director of the Progressive Policy Institute’s American Identity Project and an advocate of class-based affirmative action. Trump’s speech to Congress celebrating what he characterized as a return to merit was a “good moment, politically, for Republicans, because most Americans believe in merit.” […]
Kahlenberg, too, opposes race-based affirmative action; he testified for the plaintiffs in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard and UNC, the case that resulted in the Supreme Court’s ban. But he supports “economic” affirmative action that gives preference to low-income or first-generation students.
“If a student has a certain SAT score or set of grades and they came from a low-income family where the parents weren’t college-educated, where the neighborhood schools were pretty lousy, and they managed to do pretty well despite that—that’s something that most Americans favor,” he said. “They don’t see that as a deviation from merit; they see that as a measure of true merit.” […]
Despite the Trump administration’s focus on merit, though, they aren’t pushing to end legacy admissions.
“If you were truly committed to merit, one of the first things you would do would be to put pressure on universities to eliminate legacy preferences, which are essentially affirmative action for the rich … so one has to question the follow-through on that commitment,” said Kahlenberg.
