Opportunity U.

By making vagueness its primary virtue, the Supreme Court’s decision in University of California Regents v. Bakke 25 years ago guaranteed, in one form or another, the oral arguments that are scheduled to be heard today in a suit against the admissions process at the University of Michigan. Without debating the merits of the Michigan plan or the worthiness of its goals, the court can point to a better way of achieving the diversity that colleges should want.

The Bakke case held that the University of California could not continue with a special admission program that included provisions for “economically and/or educationally disadvantaged” applicants who were also members of a minority group, but reversed a lower court decision “insofar as it prohibits petitioner from taking race into account as a factor in its future admissions decisions.” The court recognized a compelling need for diversity, but offered little guidance for satisfying it. Hence, 25 years of fighting over how that should be accomplished and the case before the court today.

Little guidance but a warning: Justice Powell wrote in the 1978 decision that, “Racial and ethnic classifications of any sort are inherently suspect and call for the most exacting judicial scrutiny.” Writing in The Washington Post yesterday, Richard D. Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, went further. He said these classifications are not especially effective for bringing diversity to campus. His argument is compelling.

The University of Michigan awards 20 bonus points out of a possible 150 to every minority candidate’s application. The Bush administration, which has offered careful objections to this, prefers a plan used by the University of Texas, which automatically accepts students in the top 10 percent of their high school classes no matter how poor their SATs. The negatives are evident: The first gives a break to minority kids who might already have had all kinds of social and economic advantage; the second admits students who might be badly unprepared for rigorous higher education. Mr. Kahlenberg offers an already popular idea – “affirmative action for low-income students of all races” – but does so with evidence that is persuasive.

He cites, among other sources, a new study by Anthony Carnevale of the Educational Testing Service and Stephen Rose of the research firm ORC Macro. They looked at what the effect of economic affirmative action would be at the nation’s most selective 146 colleges and found it would result in a 2 percentage-point decline in racial diversity and a 28-point increase in economic diversity. “Carnevale and Rose find that a race-blind economic affirmative action program would boost African American and Latino admissions from 4 percent (under a system of grades and test scores) to 10 percent, which is somewhat below the current 12 percent representation. The study’s authors advocate combining race and class preferences in order to avoid the 2-point drop, but experience suggests most colleges will adopt economic affirmative action only when barred from using race.”

This last point is reinforced by the Bakke decision. But even the slight loss of racial diversity traded against substantial gain in economic diversity, especially to elite colleges, looks better when a powerful reason for supporting colleges is considered: College, even with all its other attributes, is still seen as a means to succeed economically. And academic standards could be maintained or improved with such a change: For real dreamers, Mr. Kahlenberg reports that under a system of economic preferences, graduation rates at elite schools would climb from 86 percent to 90 percent – if legacy and athletic preferences were also eliminated.

The most important part of his argument, however, is that the idea of economic preference already is accepted by a majority of Americans and would avoid the divisive court fights while bringing diversity to campus. That would also end some of the divisiveness that is found on campuses because of the current policies and improve education opportunities for all.