In South, working-class whites finally get a scholarship to call their own

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Some high-schoolers come home after class to care for little brothers and sisters. They wait tables on weekends and bag groceries during vacations. Perhaps no adult in their house has ever gone to college. Certainly none of the elders can help them with their algebra homework.

Other high-school students don't have to come home early. They stay for the chess club or for sports. On weekends, they attend courses to boost their SAT scores. They perfect their French on family trips to Paris and spend summers at science camp. Their educated parents help them diagram sentences and write term papers.

The first group may be as hardworking, intelligent and academically promising as the second, but its members are far less likely to go to college. And few colleges seem to care. They make a great effort to attract some minority students — including those with lower test scores than most entering freshmen — but they don't bother with the many working-class whites in the same boat.

It's a scandal, really. And that's why an Alabama heiress deserves a special salute for establishing a new kind of college scholarship. Mignon C. Smith wants to help working-class children with averages as low as C. These are students who were unable to pile up magnificent grades because they had so much else on their plates. The goal is to help these children become the first member of their family to attend college.

You don't run into many of these kids at your elite campuses. About 74 percent of students at the nation's top 146 colleges come from the richest 25 percent of the population, according to a Century Foundation study. Only 3 percent are from the poorest 25 percent.

"Put differently," the study said, "One is 25 times as likely to run into a rich student as a poor student" on one of these campuses.

Racial preferences have boosted the percentage of black and Hispanic students to 12 percent of the student body at these colleges, the study noted. If the schools had given similar preferences on the basis of family income, students in the economic bottom half would have represented 36 percent of the total, not the current 12 percent.

Affirmative action based on class rather than race has caught fire in some liberal quarters. As a cause, this one is long overdue.

"It is very difficult intellectually to justify giving a break of hundreds of points on SAT scores to the daughter of upper-middle-class, highly educated blacks and giving nothing remotely similar to the daughter of poor white high school dropouts," Ruy Texeira and Joel Rogers wrote in their 2000 guidebook for Democrats, "Why the White Working Class Still Matters."

Colleges that can't connect with this principle fail both the fairness test and their students' need for interaction with people from different backgrounds. The result is a bland campus.

An Ivy League professor once complained to me that his pampered students tended to be "perfect little packages." They were not especially brilliant or interesting. Rather, they were products of ambitious parents who had trained them in the art of amassing good grades and gold stars. Above all, the students had the luxury of free time to pursue their academic interests. When a college uses conventional measurements to predict academic success, it ends up with conventional students.

Centering an affirmative-action program on class rather than race need not work against minority enrollment. Black and Latino households tend to be poorer than white ones, so any admissions policy that gives a leg-up to low-income students should help minorities, as well.

Ahrian Davis Tyler, a Birmingham, Ala., lawyer who administers Mignon Smith's scholarship, said the program was partly a reaction to the mechanical way colleges now offer financial assistance. Colleges used to care that the applicant had been a volunteer fireman or headed a cleanup drive, she said. Now it's all based on grades and test scores.

It's really time for colleges to add an element of humanity to their admissions processes. Finding talent with less than sterling grades takes more work than crunching numbers. But any diversity worth its name must include the white kid raised by a single parent struggling to pay the rent.

Froma Harrop is a columnist for The Providence Journal. Comment by clicking here.