Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited excerpt from pages 120-26 of Class Matters: The Fight to Get Beyond Race Preferences, Reduce Inequality, and Build Real Diversity at America’s Colleges (Public Affairs, 2025).

Efforts around the turn of the twenty-first century to add into college admissions considerations of socioeconomic diversity on top of racial diversity – an idea supported by many of my liberal friends – failed mostly because it did not grapple with the fundamental forces that drive university behavior. Universities deserve credit for recognizing that racial diversity is part of what makes them excellent, and they have woven a commitment to it into their DNA. But why did all the statistical analyses of admissions – including from strong supporters of racial affirmative action – find that universities pay so much less attention to class diversity for its own sake? Four explanations stand out.

First, because achieving class diversity is more expensive than racial diversity (which can be accomplished by recruiting upper-middle-class students of color), attention to class cuts against all the other interests universities are trying to advance. Nonprofit colleges compete for prestige, which requires attracting the best students and faculty. Schools need to spend a lot on faculty salaries and campus amenities to recruit high-achieving students. Enrolling high-achieving low-income students doesn’t help – indeed, it hurts – because the financial assistance they require “diverts” resources. As the former president of Reed College explained, why spend $50,000 in aid on a promising low-income student when you can instead give five $10,000 grants to non-need-based merit aid to recruit students with high SAT scores who will boost the college’s standing?

A big part of university prestige today is associated with rankings in a guide put out by U.S. News & World Reports. Students follow it, boards of trustees pay attention to it, and college presidents’ compensation can even be tied to schools’ U.S. News ranking. “Think about the incentives,” said former Vassar president Catharine Hill. “Every dollar you use for financial aid could have been used otherwise to improve your ranking. Spending on every other thing ups your score.”

Another big reason that college presidents have avoided using class preferences (at least while racial preferences were legally available) is that it poses a risk to dip into endowments to pay for financial aid. After consulting with multiple college presidents, Georgetown University’s Anthony Carnevale said in an interview with me that presidents fear “they will get fired” if they are seen as allocating a significant portion of the endowment’s earnings to financial aid.

All of this means colleges have a self-interest in limiting economic inequality concerns to those associated with race, which are more manageable to address. As social critic Walter Benn Michaels argues, focusing on race rather than class tells the wealthy “what they want to hear – that the only poverty they need worry about is the poverty that’s the effect of racism.” It renders white poverty “invisible.” Colleges then double down on this approach by admitting Black and Hispanic students from upper-middle-class backgrounds rather than those from poor communities, saving even more money.

Second, as a practical matter, universities focus more on race than class because it is easier for selective institutions to mask a lack of socioeconomic diversity on campus than a lack of racial diversity. Race is far more visible to the naked eye than class. And while the federal government requires universities to detail the racial makeup of student bodies every year, it does not require those same universities to provide a socioeconomic breakdown by income quartile or quintile.

Most people experience a daily reality marked by rising economic inequality and a slow decline in racial inequality. And yet on campus, race utterly dominates discussions.

Third, as Larry Summers has pointed out, elite universities are subject to strong bureaucratic forces pushing for racial diversity, legacy preferences, and athletic preferences, but comparatively few institutional forces promoting socioeconomic diversity. Professors may be Black, Hispanic, or female, but because they are often graduates of elite colleges, few come from working-class backgrounds. Indeed, faculty members are twenty-five times more likely than the general population to have a parent with a Ph.D. It is telling that even with strong support for socioeconomic diversity at the presidential level at Amherst and Harvard, data reveal that overall socioeconomic profiles of their student bodies remained enormously skewed toward the wealthy.

Fourth, it appears that America’s selective colleges may reflect ugly cultural attitudes that flow from an excessive embrace of a meritocratic ideology. As the Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel has noted, American meritocracy gives rise to what he calls “the last acceptable prejudice”: a disdain for families with less formal education. Social scientists have found that highly educated elites “may denounce racism and sexism but are unapologetic about their negative attitudes toward the less educated.” A study conducted by five psychologists concluded that well-educated elites in the United States exhibit no less bias than those who are less educated; “it is rather that [their] targets of prejudice are different.” Given this milieu, it is not surprising that legacy applicants receive more plus points in admissions than students from families without college-educated parents.

As a result of these four forces, the culture on America’s elite college campuses has become disconnected from that of everyday Americans. Most people experience a daily reality marked by rising economic inequality and a slow decline in racial inequality. And yet on campus, race utterly dominates discussions. Although it is commonly said that “we don’t like to talk about race,” Walter Benn Michaels argues, “in fact, we love to talk about race. And in the university, not only do we talk about it, we write books and articles about it, we teach and take classes about it, and we arrange our admissions policies in order to take it into account.” He contends that we do so to avoid talking about class, discussion of which remains largely off limits.