Humanity values intelligence. Our history books are filled with people who could effectively use their available resources to accomplish exceptional feats. From military strategists like Julius Caesar to literary playwrights like Shakespeare or Oscar Wilde and academic geniuses like Einstein and Newton, we recognize the significance of these geniuses, even if we wouldn’t normally label them as such. What we usually don’t recognize is that these intelligent minds are cemented in our history because they lived in the right place at the right time. Is it really a coincidence that most modern geniuses came to fruition in cities with access to tools to cultivate their extraordinary talents?
For example, Oscar Wilde was one of the greatest playwrights of the 19th century who used his short, troubled life to create poignant pieces of work that continue to influence the literary world today. But what is usually left out is that Wilde came from a high aristocratic English family, his mother was an established novelist, and his parents regularly hosted prominent artistic figures during his childhood. Furthermore, his father entirely funded his university education at Trinity College Dublin and Oxford University. Despite his personal problems, did Wilde’s particular upbringing not already predispose his artistic talent? Had he not been born to such fortunate circumstances, would Wilde have still accomplished the level of success as a playwright as he did? How many forgotten people were just like Wilde but did not have access to the institutions he had?
Nobody can say what life Wilde would have lived had his circumstances been different. However, it is no doubt that his artistic potential was cultivated by his presence around prominent artistic figures in his childhood and prestigious education at Oxford. The truth is exceptionality is determined by whether potential is cultivated, as it was in Wilde’s life, or not.
The U.S. has seen a dramatic increase in wealth inequality in recent years with the top 10% of American households owning a staggering 70% of total household wealth, starkly contrasted with the bottom 50% owning a mere 2.5%. Furthermore, this inequality is perpetuated by a lack of opportunities for upward social mobility such as poorly funded education and little access to career opportunities, creating a circular pattern where low income leads to not being able to afford better opportunities, which leads back to low income. In fact, according to a paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, which used administrative records on the incomes of more than 40 million children and their parents to describe intergenerational socioeconomic mobility in the United States, the probability of a child earning in the top quintile of family income given that their parents earned in the bottom quintile in most of the U.S. is less than 17%.
This stratification has to do in part with rapid globalization and recent public policy, but it is important to recognize that significant American wealth inequality has existed for generations and that this intergenerational inequality has measurable patterns, namely among race and location.
Wealth inequality in the context of race can be conceptualized through median real worth, the difference between assets and liabilities, among different race groups. According to the 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances, two ethnoracial groups stand out when comparing household MRWs to the typical American family MRW: Black families and Hispanic families. Black and Hispanic families had MRWs of $44,900 and $61,600 respectively compared to the national household average of $192,900. In other words Black families owned 23 cents and Hispanic families owned 31 cents for every $1 a typical American family owned.
Source: Chetty et al., 2018
The issue runs deeper when considering racial differences in intergenerational mobility. Another study from NBER and the U.S. Census Bureau found that, on average, intergenerational mobility among Hispanic and white children was similar, but “in stark contrast,” Black and Native American children have higher rates of downward mobility across all parental income levels.
The paper further stated that “a black child born to parents in the top quintile is roughly as likely to fall to the bottom family income quintile as he or she is to remain in the top quintile; in contrast, white children are nearly five times as likely to remain in the top quintile as they are to fall to the bottom quintile.”
Source: Chetty et al., 2014
In today’s society, the disparities in access to education and opportunities across socioeconomic and ethnoracial demographics have never been more apparent. One effective strategy to bridge this gap is by intentionally increasing access to social spaces that often lack opportunities, such as college admissions. This includes creating affirmative action programs, scholarships, and mentorship initiatives aimed at students from underrepresented backgrounds. By doing so, institutions ensure that deserving individuals, regardless of their socioeconomic or racial background, have an equal shot at success and upward socioeconomic mobility. Prioritizing diversity and inclusion in admissions gives marginalized groups a chance to break the intergenerational cycle caused by the U.S.’s racial wealth inequality and lack of socioeconomic mobility, making a good case for higher education institutions to heavily weight race in their affirmative action programs. Thus, prestigious American colleges and universities indeed used race as a key factor in admissions for decades.
However, on June 29th, 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court passed a 6-3 ruling on race-based affirmative action programs in higher education which concluded that such programs violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. Major critiques of race-based affirmative action programs from the conservative majority were that certain admissions goals, such as the University of North Carolina’s of “training future leaders in the public and private sectors,” were not measurable and that certain classifications of racial groups were imprecise or too overarching to encapsulate ethnic identities, such the “Asian” category. Another shortcoming of the systems was that while they aimed to provide greater access to opportunities for certain ethnoracial groups that have historically lacked them, they refused to acknowledge the similar realities for other ethnoracial groups in the same communities. All three liberal justices issued dissents, with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson specifically asserting that the ruling “refuse[s] to see, much less solve for, the elephant in the room — the race-linked disparities that continue to impede achievement of our great nation’s full potential.”
While this decision has had monumental impacts on admissions policies of many colleges and universities across the nation, the University System of Georgia was less affected. In 2000, in a lawsuit similar to the recent Supreme Court case, three white women sued the University of Georgia for alleged discrimination in admissions, and UGA stated they would not fight the case. Since then, the University System of Georgia — a group of 26 public institutions of higher learning including Georgia Tech and UGA — enacted a policy prohibiting the consideration of race and ethnicity in admissions.
Georgia Tech in particular invests in a wide variety of programs such as improving STEM education in various school systems across Georgia, running educational STEM camps, providing direct admission for valedictorians and salutatorians of every Georgia high school of a certain size, and even raising private funds for providing scholarships for qualifying students. Over the last decade, Georgia Tech has set new records for selectivity and retention while still increasing in diversity. However, despite the success of these programs, Tech has struggled in attracting students from low-income families.
One alternative to race-based affirmative action is socioeconomic class-based affirmative action, a system for affirmative action programs which aims to provide budding geniuses admission to universities while considering the constraints their communities place on them. While race-based affirmative action addresses wealth inequality by inferring constraints in the context of the race of an applicant, class-based affirmative action can do the same in the context of the socioeconomic class of the area they grew up in. In fact, just like race, location is also heavily correlated with wealth inequality, which should come to no surprise considering the high intersectionality between the three.
In a purely class-based approach, institutions for higher education can assess access to opportunities based on household income percentiles; in this way, universities are able to provide admissions to all deserving students held back by their socioeconomic class, irrespective of race. In the context of Georgia, where there are both urban centers and rural communities with varying levels of resources, income and class-based affirmative action can be a crucial tool for promoting equal opportunity. However, a major flaw of this system is that it fails to account for the significant disparities in intergenerational mobility between racial groups. Still, a primarily income-based affirmative action program that additionally assesses impacts of an applicant’s racial identity on an individualized basis, which the Supreme Court’s decision permits, seems to be the best way to mitigate the impact of generational wealth inequality and provide pathways for upward mobility.