How do you determine the race of a student? "Class" can be designated by objective measures like family income, whether or not parents are university graduates, etc.
By comparison, how do you determine if an applicant is Black or Latin? Do you have them prove ancestry all the way back to Africa? Brazil is experiencing this issue [1]:
> And that's when this story gets even more complicated. Because in order to "prove" that he was Afro-Brazilian, his lawyers needed to find some criteria. He went to seven dermatologists who used something called the Fitzpatrick scale that grades skin tone from one to seven, or whitest to darkest. The last doctor even had a special machine.
> A few weeks ago, these race tribunals were made mandatory for all government jobs. In one state, they even issued guidelines about how to measure lip size, hair texture and nose width, something that for some has uncomfortable echoes of racist philosophies in the 19th century.
Race is by definition self-reported, and is easily gamed, as recent high profile stories show. 1950s America everyone wanted to be white. 2020s America everyone wants to identify as something else. This should tell you how the incentives have inverted.
Class is also easy to game and hard to define.
And what is class - educational attainment, income, labor vs capital, all 3, 2 out of 3?
How do you conclusively determine educational attainment of parents beyond what they self-report, in an automated, accurate, low-cost way?
Income could be low for high status jobs like professors, journalists, non-profits, etc. Some of the highest status people you meet in blue cities have seemingly little income but high income.
Assets are self reported and hideable.
Is a plumber who didn't graduate high school but runs his own business making $90k in a LCOL area where homes cost $150k upper or lower class? What about a plumber working under someone else in a HCOL area making $120k but where homes cost $500k?
Educational attainment is pretty easy to judge. Parents almost certainly have linkedin profiles. Census data also asks for education attainment. Incomes and assets are also attainable via tax info. Sure, they can cheat on income taxes, but usually that's making $100M in assets look like $60M. Just based on address they can at least determine the value of your home. An applicant attending Deerfield Academy that reports a family of low income and no parental education is going to ring some alarm bells, and probably isn't going to pass muster.
We don't need to conclusively define class, but we can at least quantify it relative to other applicants. Is the plumber making $90k upper classic? We don't need to pin a label onto it, but we can say they're higher than someone making $40k a year and not as high class as someone making $500k a year.
Both of your examples (linkedin profile & census response) are the very definition of self-reported. Once they become a measure that has negative consequences for your childs college admission, they will stop being as accurately self reported. Further - a single social network is not an objective measure.
You are conflating income & assets. Income is generally hard to hide, assets is much easier. Income is reported to the government by employers. Assets can be infrequently marked to market and illiquid, offshore, etc.
Clearly the examples you use of multi-million assets and prestigious private schools are clear signals, but most of these things are on the margin.
The argument is not so much about the 5% vs the 95%.
It's the tougher decisions about who is in the 30% vs 55% vs 70%.
No, distinguishing between the 30%, 55% and 70% is not really relevant. It's mostly about distinguishing the top 5-10% from the rest of the applicant pool. As per the article:
> A study published in 2017 found that most of Harvard’s undergraduates hailed from families in the top 10% of the income distribution. Princeton had more students from the top 1% than the bottom 60%.
It is not nearly so simple for someone in the top 1% to try and pretend to be part of the bottom 60%. Their home address alone would usually be enough to mark them as upper income. Work history is not so easy to hide or fabricate. The government has employment records, and people need to disclose their work history to get future employment.
Separating the 30%, 55%, and 70% isn't really relevant. All of them are lower-class in the context of university admissions. Furthermore, these people wouldn't have the means to hide their assets, and they wouldn't even have that much assets to hide. The median net worth in 2019 was just over $120k [1]. For these people, you mostly just look at income.
> Is a plumber who didn't graduate high school but runs his own business making $90k in a LCOL area where homes cost $150k upper or lower class? What about a plumber working under someone else in a HCOL area making $120k but where homes cost $500k?
idk, these seem like things that can be reasonably calculated based on current statistics
By comparison, how do you determine if an applicant is Black or Latin? Do you have them prove ancestry all the way back to Africa? Brazil is experiencing this issue [1]:
> And that's when this story gets even more complicated. Because in order to "prove" that he was Afro-Brazilian, his lawyers needed to find some criteria. He went to seven dermatologists who used something called the Fitzpatrick scale that grades skin tone from one to seven, or whitest to darkest. The last doctor even had a special machine.
> A few weeks ago, these race tribunals were made mandatory for all government jobs. In one state, they even issued guidelines about how to measure lip size, hair texture and nose width, something that for some has uncomfortable echoes of racist philosophies in the 19th century.
1. https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/09/29/495665329/...