Why We Need Affirmative Action, College Loan Forgiveness, and Federal Education Funding
The stranglehold of white men on US society comes down to education
In my last article, I poured my outrage upon the page regarding the recent SCOTUS decisions. It seemed like they made a calculated decision to dump on every group Republicans love to hate: LGBTQ+, People of Color, and poor people (they already clobbered women with the Dobbs decision). It felt like a couple of gut punches and an uppercut to the jaw.
As I thought beyond my visceral reaction, I realized the impact of their decisions — besides being calculated to put everybody who differs from mainstream white in their place — is mainly upon education and upward mobility. Striking down Affirmative Action and student loan forgiveness will negatively affect both those factors for minorities, women, and poor white men while perpetuating the age-old unfair advantage of the children of the rich white oligarchy.
Upward mobility in this country pretty much requires either a good education in grade school, high school, and college, or very hard work and a lot of economic luck. A few people can manage to work that hard and find the luck, but for the vast majority, education is a much more reliable road to a better future. There is still a strong correlation between advanced education and higher earnings and social status.
The trouble with how education works in the US lies in how we fund it and manage it. Grade schools and high schools are funded and managed locally. This means if you grow up in a poor neighborhood, regardless of race or gender, your school is very likely underfunded because low property values (and low population in rural areas) do not produce the high dollar property taxes needed to fund schools optimally. Underfunded schools directly correlate to poor student performance and vice versa. The result is that poor kids from poor neighborhoods with poor schools begin the trek to upward mobility with a distinct educational disadvantage. Comparatively, rich kids from rich neighborhoods and schools start with a significant advantage from the start, having not only more life experiences available to them because of their wealth but also receiving a better education at the lower grades — a much better start in life.
As for local management of schools, this is where we see racism, sexism, xenophobia, homophobia, and even aporophobia come into play. If a local area is predominantly white and inclined for religious or cultural reasons to have a bias against particular groups of people, the dominant white group can grind that axe in the public schools. They can insist that curricula and library books be expunged of topics they dislike such as “woke culture,” Critical Race Theory, women’s equality, and any other aspects of history and culture with which they disagree. This puts any child in their target groups at an immediate disadvantage because they don’t learn their own true value and heritage, and they grow up feeling invalidated and “less than” throughout their school age years. Local control simply enables narrow-minded local views to prevail and perpetuate longstanding cultural divides as well as give rise to new ones that add to the extra burden minorities, women, and poor kids must overcome.
What’s the social outcome for students who grow up in poorer schools? Growing up in poor neighborhoods with poor schools produces low achievement and multigenerational poverty. Over time, this tendency has increased segregation both in housing and in education, the two being closely intertwined. Poor neighborhoods become poorer and poor segregated neighborhoods become more segregated with each generation. As for school management by white racists or even unintentionally biased white people, kids who grow up feeling discriminated against or excluded in some way, especially by racism, exhibit lifelong mental and physical health impacts, to say nothing of outcomes regarding income and achievement.
Expanding from schools to the national picture, we still have a society dominated by rich white men. In elected offices, 62% are white males despite being only 30% of the population. In industry, 80% of executives are white males. Understanding the school situation leads us to understand why the power structure is so slow to change. How can minorities, women, and poor whites ever hope to gain fair access to the highest levels of power locally, regionally, or nationally when they start out at such a disadvantage.
How can we expect improvement in statistics showing the continued dominance of white men if we do not legislate an advantage in college admissions and hiring for those who continue to be disadvantaged? Minorities, women, and even poor whites need some form of conscious social advancement to give them a boost in overcoming the hardships and poor education they endure while growing up.
We had two effective solutions already. Affirmative Action was one of those. Affirmative Action allows colleges and employers to consider race and gender as additional factors in favor of Black and female applicants to help boost minority and female admissions and hiring. This was a purposeful decision of our society intended to break the white male stranglehold on the highest, most influential positions. It’s a policy that takes decades to be effective as minority and women applicants advance in their careers.
Without a coherent policy of social advancement, the imbalance in our society that is still present will simply revert back to the pattern of the past, and minorities, women, and the poor will once again have even less of a place in leadership in our society. For evidence that Affirmative Action works, we need look no further than the SCOTUS that just struck down Affirmative Action — Justices Thomas and Sotomayor both benefitted from Affirmative Action in their admissions to Ivy-league colleges. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote eloquently in her dissenting opinion of the SCOTUS decision on Affirmative Action explaining exactly what I shared above and much more.
Subsidized college for the poor and middle class was another factor that helped minorities, women, and poor white students to become upwardly mobile. It does no good to apply to college if you can’t pay for it. Unfortunately, the subsidized state universities of the 1960s that educated me and my peers nearly for free have become outrageously expensive, together with all the private universities. When colleges began raising tuition year after year, eliminating subsidies, the only way for non-wealthy students to get an education became student loans.
In her book, The Sum of Us, Heather McGhee makes a compelling case that subsidies substantially benefitted minority, female, and poor white male students. Moving to a loan-financed model, she argues, was the deliberate plan of racist whites because minority students generally have more trouble obtaining the loans. Now if loan forgiveness is also removed, those minorities, women, and poor white students who did manage to get loans, will have a much harder time advancing in life. The loan burden may prevent many from buying homes because their loan payments subtract from income and make qualifying for a mortgage impossible. Even buying a car can be impacted by existing loan payments. Additionally, many students who might have gone to college will be excluded because loans and loan repayment put college out of reach for them.
To solve the above problems, we need to continue Affirmative Action, forgive all student loans, and make public college free again to prevent a perpetuation of the student loan problem. Even private universities where a student may need to go to get a specialized education in a particular profession such as medicine, law, or engineering should be subsidized by the government for minority, female, poor and lower middle class students below a certain income. The rich will always be able to afford those schools, even if they would otherwise be unqualified, but the poor and minorities may never get there without a consciously crafted upward path.
Even more importantly, I propose a new idea: We need national funding and management of public schools, including public universities, to ensure all schools are funded equally and meet strict national standards of educational quality and equality. Only federal funding can ensure every school in the country, regardless of state or neighborhood gets equal funding with all other schools. And as we know so well from the Jim Crow era, racists hide behind “states’ rights.” Discrimination in local schools is made far easier by local funding and local control. Only federal management can ensure an unbiased approach to education in every school in the land. Certainly we do need mechanisms for local parental input in every school, but such input must be tempered by the consistency across the board of federal law and federal funding to ensure a genuinely fair, nondiscriminatory education for every American student. With the strategies outlined above, we might, in a generation, begin to unravel the problems of de facto segregation, discrimination, and lack of upward mobility that our educational system still currently encourages.
Postscript: I just saw a news flash that Harvard is being sued to stop legacy admissions in the wake of the SCOTUS Affirmative Action decision. Yes! Why should unqualified rich white kids get preference over highly qualified others just because their rich daddy went there? If there is to be no Affirmative Action, then let’s at least require *everybody* to compete on the same playing field, including the privileged.
Please feel free to leave a comment or start a discussion!
