Who are the Disenfranchised White People?

I usually disagree with Ross Douchbag Douthat, the smug, often borderline-ignorant conservative Times columnist, and it's no surprise he chose this as his subject matter for his most recent column.  But I found it of particular interest as someone who once wrote a one-act play solely on the topic of deciding whether to check the box on her Yale University college application (I didn't, nor did I get in - your loss, bulldogs!).


Last year, two Princeton sociologists, Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford, published a book-length study of admissions and affirmative action at eight highly selective colleges and universities. Unsurprisingly, they found that the admissions process seemed to favor black and Hispanic applicants, while whites and Asians needed higher grades and SAT scores to get in. But what was striking, as Russell K. Nieli pointed out last week on the conservative Web site Minding the Campus, was which whites were most disadvantaged by the process: the downscale, the rural and the working-class. 

This was particularly pronounced among the private colleges in the study. For minority applicants, the lower a family’s socioeconomic position, the more likely the student was to be admitted. For whites, though, it was the reverse. An upper-middle-class white applicant was three times more likely to be admitted than a lower-class white with similar qualifications. 

Full article.