☆ Wall Street Journal: ACA 7’s unfair student aid scheme invites “bitterness and resentment”
“Even some who favor preferences in admissions would likely balk at a better package of aid simply because of an applicant’s race,” writes William McGurn in a WSJ opinion piece: ACA 7 would allow schools to offer more financial aid money to a wealthy black student, and on better terms, than to a poor Asian student.
California’s constitutional battle is rooted in an amendment, Proposition 209, which the state’s voters approved in 1996. Proposition 209 forbids discrimination against or preferential treatment for anyone “on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin” in “public employment, public education, or public contracting.” That’s clear enough, which is why activists are always trying to gut it.
In a Feb. 14 letter to Monique Limón, the California Senate’s president pro tem, [Gail Heriot, a recently retired professor of law at the University of San Diego and a former member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights] argued that while the financial aid packages of two students can look similar, big differences may remain. For example, “an African American student would be given grants, while a student of any other race would be saddled with student loans, despite having equal (or even greater) financial need.”
The new ACA 7’s elevation of race over need could thus have the perverse result of a more generous financial-aid package going to a wealthy black student than to a poor Asian student. We know how this game ends: in bitterness and resentment. Even some who favor preferences in admissions would likely balk at a better package of aid simply because of an applicant’s race.
[The state lawmaker who introduced ACA 7 Corey Jackson] insists his bill wouldn’t eliminate the constitutional prohibition on racial discrimination. He put it this away to California Black Media: “What ACA 7 really does is clarify Prop. 209, because too often local governments and others apply it to everything.”
Edward Blum isn’t buying it. He runs Students for Fair Admissions, which brought the case in which the Supreme Court declared racial preferences in college admissions unconstitutional.
“California voters rejected race preferences decades ago,” Mr. Blum says. “Now there is yet another effort to reintroduce them, this time through financial aid and other channels, which ignores the clear mandate of the voters. The Constitution’s demand for equal treatment must be defended by every generation.”
Read the whole thing here.
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