Indeed, a growing number of policy wonks, intellectuals, and college administrators are preaching the imperative of a bona fide policy of class based affirmative action in college admissions.
But with a solution there's a duty to take the next step, one that realizes the promise of class based affirmative action by instituting it as policy.
It was hard to miss the clarion call for class based affirmative action seen in the pages of The New York Times the past few weeks.
Starting with a September 24 op-ed from Jerome Karabel, the UC-Berkeley sociologist, and in two articles from "The College Issue" of The New York Times Magazine the following Sunday, you might think class based affirmative action is on a roll.
In one of the Magazine articles, Columbia humanities professor Andrew Delbanco chronicles the role of the modern university in American society, and not surprisingly low-income students and class based affirmative action is brought up once again.
Karabel calls the stunningly meager number of low-income students enrolled at selective colleges a "national scandal" and prescribes a policy of class based affirmative action to address this national embarrassment.
In this important book "a thumb on the scale" or, in other words, class based affirmative action is suggested as the remedy to brining more qualified low-income applicants to selective campuses.
Instead of race based affirmative action, he is throwing the support of his administration behind the idea of economic-based affirmative action- -- and he might include his support for proposals that illustrate this new approach such as universal school vouchers based on family income (which Reich advocates in his book).
With suggesting that class based affirmative action is moving beyond just an idea he makes passing reference to a seminal work on the topic by invoking the catch phrase from Equity and Excellence in Higher Education, a book co-written by William Bowen, the former president of Princeton.
This is where class based affirmative action can make a difference by giving colleges and universities the right-of-way to recognize the vast array of challenges that come with growing up low-income in American society and tip the scale in favor of more low-income applicants.
