Before the Supreme Court ended race-conscious admissions, Harvard had a majority-minority student body and twenty-two times as many rich students as poor ones; 71 percent of its Black and Hispanic students came from the richest fifth of those populations. “Racially integrated but economically segregated,” says Richard Kahlenberg, and not, in his view, a progressive result. He spent decades arguing that selective colleges should give a leg up to low-income and working-class applicants of every race, and then did something few liberals would: he testified for the plaintiffs in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.
In this TalksOnLaw interview, Joel Cohen speaks with Richard Kahlenberg, Director of Housing Policy and of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute, a lecturer at George Washington University, and author of Class Matters: The Fight to Get Beyond Race Preferences, Reduce Inequality, and Build Real Diversity at America’s Colleges, about what the 2023 decision allows, what universities are doing with it, and why he expects the far right’s next target, economic affirmative action, to survive.
