Color and Money: How Rich White Kids Are Winning the War over College Affirmative Action (review)

The 2007 Supreme Court decision striking down race-conscious school assignment policies in the Louisville and Seattle school systems and Ward Connerly's quest to get referenda opposing affirmative action using racial and ethnic preferences on several state ballots in the upcoming presidential election indicate the tenuous state of affirmative action. Drawing on his experiences as a seasoned reporter with the Chronicle of Higher Education, Peter Schmidt expands the debate on access to elite institutions beyond issues of race to consider the role of class. Specifically, he asks why working- and middle-class students of all races are underrepresented at selective colleges and universities.

Schmidt details how privileged students, from the very beginning of their academic lives, wage an assault on the merit-based admissions policies of selective colleges. Schmidt adeptly explores the complex intersection of race and socioeconomic status and the effect that continuing residential segregation has on the education of poor children and children of color. Children from impoverished neighborhoods are disadvantaged in the college-going process because they attend underfunded schools that lack advanced courses and adequate academic advising. He further explains how wealthy White children are advantaged in the admissions process because they have access to prestigious, elite secondary schools.

Schmidt describes how, having availed themselves of every possible advantage prior to applying, "rich White kids" continue to use any means necessary during the application process to obtain a spot at an elite institution. He quite effectively argues that children in wealthy families have an advantage through expensive standardized-test preparation classes and family donations to colleges where they seek admissions. Probably his most effective argument about the advantages of privileged students in the admissions process relates to legacies. The result, as Schmidt effectively reveals, is that the meritocracy many seek to defend against affirmative action policies simply does not exist.

At times, Schmidt overemphasizes the influence of socioeconomic status and minimizes the role of race in the ability of individuals to realize equal educational opportunity. A central argument of his book is that, because race-based admissions policies are under attack, perhaps other avenues for ensuring equitable access should be identified and proposes socioeconomic status as providing a legitimate proxy for race.

However, the salience of race cannot be denied given that, even as Schmidt reports, "Black, Hispanic, and Native American students have higher dropout rates, lower scores on admissions tests for graduate and professional schools, and lower passage rates on certification and licensure tests" (p. 93), regardless of their parents' socioeconomic status. The significant but often overlooked relationship between race and class in America demands acknowledgement that one cannot be isolated from the other.

Schmidt's experience as a reporter gives him a unique and powerful perspective. As one might expect, his reporting of events is compelling. However, significant methodological problems diminish the potency of his argument, which is intended as a relatively innovative call for equalizing educational opportunity. The danger in Schmidt's presentation—with footnotes and references to scholarly work—is that many readers may unquestioningly accept his broad conclusions.

His reliance on anecdotal evidence and reports of single individuals is appropriate in journalism to enhance the human-interest element of an article, but perhaps less effective and even dangerous when trying to make arguments that have important policy implications. For example, he uses a single interview with a faculty member on a college admissions committee to argue that colleges admit "a few White students with admissions test scores so abysmally low they stood little chance of graduating" (p. 107) to mask the test score gap between admitted Black and White students. This bold assertion requires more than a single quotation to support it and falls well below the required standard for academic scholarship.

Perhaps the most disappointing chapter of the book is Chapter 9, entitled "The Diversity Dodge: Fuzzy Research to the Rescue." In this chapter, Schmidt attempts...