Open a New Front for Racial Justice

This article is from a cover package of essays entitled Ten New Ideas for the Democratic Party to Help the Working Class, and Itself. Find the full series here.

If there’s one message the Washington Monthly has been trying to get across over the years in its writing about higher education, it’s this: Stop obsessing over wealthy elite universities that educate the few, and pay more attention to the underfunded, unfancy schools that educate the many. For Democrats (or anyone else) concerned about America’s costly and inequitable higher education system, this should be common sense. If your aim is to make the country more prosperous and fair, focus your reform efforts on the institutions of higher learning that affect the most people. 

It is hard, however, for this idea to penetrate the minds of the affluent liberals who have outsized influence over the agenda of the Democratic Party. That’s because they are fixated on the kind of elite colleges they went to, or tried to get into, or desperately want their kids to attend. The New York Times, written by and for such people, mentioned Harvard University about a thousand times in non-sports-related stories over the past year, according to a Google search. It cited Arizona State, the country’s largest university (with 80,000 students on campus, versus Harvard’s 7,100), only 79 times. It referred to the University of Central Florida, the nation’s fourth largest (69,000 students), fewer than 20 times. In all, the Times cited Harvard more often than the 10 largest U.S. universities combined. 

When these liberals consider how higher education might ameliorate the plight of the underprivileged, they naturally think the solution is to open for racial minorities the path that brought them wealth, status, and influence—admission to a selective university. That’s a big reason why, for decades, affirmative action in college admissions was at the center of liberal efforts to advance racial justice. 

The main argument for affirmative action in higher education was, and remains, sound. Elite colleges produce a disproportionate number of a country’s leaders, and it’s unhealthy for a democracy if that elite core of students doesn’t at least roughly reflect the diversity of the country. And affirmative action did some good—the percentage of Black students admitted to selective colleges rose considerably in the 1960s and ’70s before leveling off in the 1980s. 

Yet affirmative action never benefited more than a tiny fraction of minority students, even as it proved politically divisive in ways helpful to its conservative critics. A Brookings study found that only 13 percent of Black students, 14 percent of Latino students, and 8 percent of Native American students in 2019 attended a college that practiced affirmative action. The rest went to schools that admitted most or all applicants so felt little need to adjust admissions numbers based on race. After the Supreme Court in 2023 made most race-based admissions practices illegal, more than two-thirds of Americans, including nearly half of African Americans, told Gallup the decision was “mostly a good thing.” 

Over the past decade, the left has championed another set of policies aimed at easing the paths of racial and ethnic minorities on colleges campuses: DEI, short for diversity, equity, and inclusion. These policies include everything from hiring “chief diversity officers” to mandatory antiracism seminars for students to requirements that prospective faculty sign statements pledging to advance DEI goals in their teaching. Though present to some extent on a wide range of campuses today, DEI programs are highly concentrated among elite institutions. North Carolina’s two flagships, the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill and North Carolina State, spent nearly twice as much on DEI programs as the Tarheel State’s other 14 public universities combined, even though the latter educate more than twice as many students. 

DEI’s defenders argue that these programs are necessary to combat institutional racism on campuses. But while that goal makes sense, it’s hard to find evidence that DEI programs as currently structured have advanced it. As the Washington Monthly contributing editor Nicholas Confessore reported in The New York Times Magazine this past fall, the University of Michigan has invested nearly a quarter of a billon dollars on DEI programs since 2016, more than any university in America, but has seen no increase in the percentage of Black students admitted to the institution. Moreover, he wrote, “in a survey released in late 2022, students and faculty members across the board reported a less positive campus climate than at the program’s start and less of a sense of belonging.” In the past two years, seven red states, including North Carolina, have rolled back or eliminated DEI programs in their state colleges.

Here’s the harsh truth: The strategy of trying to advance the interests of African Americans and other minorities by reengineering the policies of elite schools has failed. Spectacularly.

That doesn’t mean, however, that liberals should abandon the cause of racial justice in higher education. It means that they should shift their agenda to efforts that will do more good. 

It’s not like there hasn’t been racial progress in higher education. The percentage of African Americans who earned a college degree grew by 9.3 percentage points between 2009 and 2022, compared to 9 percentage points for whites, according to the Lumina Foundation. Elite colleges, however, contributed virtually nothing to that progress. Instead, it largely happened on campuses that most affluent liberals are only vaguely aware exist and probably wouldn’t be eager for their own kids to attend: regional public universities. 

These are the schools with “state” in their name, like Grand Valley State University in Michigan, or that reference their location, like Northern Arizona University. They tend not to be very selective, admitting 80 percent or more of applicants. They charge tuition that is more than 25 percent cheaper on average than other colleges. They generally draw working- and middle-class students from their surrounding regions, and their student bodies reflect the diversity of those regions. 

Regional publics are the workhorses of higher education, conferring more than 40 percent of all four-year degrees in America. But here’s the most striking fact: They award 58 percent of all bachelor’s degrees earned by African Americans. No other sector comes close (historically Black colleges and universities, another crucial path for Black achievement, grant 13 percent of Black BAs, but many of those schools are also regional publics). They also bestow 44 percent of the four-year degrees Latinos earn.

Regional publics accomplish this astonishing feat despite grossly inequitable funding. On average, they receive $1,091 (or about 10 percent) less state support per student than flagships, one-twentieth the funding from federal research grants and contracts, and a tiny fraction of income from endowments that elite schools enjoy. 

Liberals who are serious about racial justice in higher education should stop listening to elite colleges about how to achieve it. If those institutions want to maintain a fair share of minorities on their campuses—still a worthy goal—there’s a way forward. They should spend some of their own sizable resources on building the kind of prep schools that U.S. service academies like West Point use to meet their diversity needs (promising but underprepared students spend a year at these prep schools getting their grades and test scores up before entering the academies). The Supreme Court has not outlawed this method of race-conscious admissions.  

Instead, liberals should put all their energies into raising awareness of and demanding more funding for regional public universities—along with community colleges, the other big, racially integrated sector of higher education that serves working- and middle-class students. To their credit, President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats advocated legislation—the American Families Plan—that would have helped these institutions by, among other things, greatly boosting Pell Grant funding. It was blocked in the Senate by 50 Republicans and two Democrats. Biden also pushed a provision to make community college free. It was quietly sabotaged by lobbyists for elite colleges that would not benefit from it.

For too long, affluent liberals have been led to believe that elite universities are at the vanguard of the fight for racial justice. Turns out they were being duped, and the real action was elsewhere all along. 

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