Color and Money: How Rich White Kids Are Winning the War Over College Affirmative Action
By Peter Schmidt
Palgrave, 2007
251 pages
Reviewed by Bruce J. Jones
Assistant Director of Admission
Whitman College
Walla Walla, WA
A more accurate name for Peter Schmidt’s provocatively titled Color and Money: How Rich White Kids Are Winning The War Over College Affirmative Action might be An Exhaustive History of Affirmative Action in Education. Of course I would not have bought the book then.
Schmidt is uniquely qualified to write this history as a former Education Week journalist and current The Chronicle of Higher Education editor. He leaves no stone unturned in reviewing the legal, educational and political history of affirmative action. From Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 to Grutter v. Bollinger in 2003, from Gunnar Myrdal’s iconic An American Dilemma to The Shape of the River by former Ivy League presidents Derek Bok and William Bowen, and from 60’s cultural and political unrest to current backlash ballot initiatives Schmidt provides a definitive chronicle. Unfortunately it is somewhat dense with information thus I kept hoping for some of the drama the book’s title seemed to suggest.
Although the author indicates he will focus “on admissions to the elite institutions that serve roughly 15% of four-year college students” he covers a much broader horizon, including the history of affirmative action in K-12 schooling as well as all of higher education. He traces the somewhat recent impact of financial aid (governmental and institutional), specifically the regressive trends toward loans over grants and merit money over need-based awards, moves that tend to further marginalize the neediest students.
Schmidt claims that colleges initially reacted to black political unrest in the 1960’s by affirmatively admitting students who may or may not have been academically competent. However he claims colleges, who many would accuse “of being leftist indoctrination camps”, have always been “bastions of the bourgeoisie”.
Corporate America, more committed to a global perspective and affirmative action as good practice than higher education, has pushed colleges to be more aggressive in admitting and graduating minority students. Schmidt appears to suggest that in a face-off between business and higher education, business would claim the progressive higher ground while colleges rely on the status quo.
While corporations motor on in search of a diverse employee pool, colleges and municipal agencies suffer the political backlash of referendums and legal challenges that seek to reverse affirmative action initiatives. Schmidt undermines affirmative action by referencing the lack of “empirical evidence…that racial diversity produces educational benefits”. An aggressive defense of affirmative action as a call to right historical wrongs, as an engine of social justice, and as a pragmatic response necessary to grow an equitable, economically successful society would have been welcome, but Schmidt, despite his apparent beliefs, stays on the journalistic sidelines.
Some of the more interesting reporting recounts the waffling of every presidential administration from John F. Kennedy through George W. Bush. Affirmative action appears to be too hot a political potato to handle and members of the Supreme Court, agreeing to consider the thorny issue, are too tied and too loyal to their elite alma maters to articulate a definitive decision.
Eventually Schmidt advocates class as opposed to race-based affirmative action, the need to offer a proactive hand to those on lower economic rungs. While this is both a noble and politically palatable stance, the overriding issue is cost, especially in our current economy. When the richest of colleges, those able to fully fund all undergraduates, enroll only a single digit percentage of Pell Grant recipients, it is easy to be cynical about higher education’s commitment to change.