Need-Blind: Why Harvard Hardly Accepts Low-Income Students

ver the past several years, Harvard College has fought a war to preserve race-conscious affirmative action.

On this front, Harvard is on the right side of history. Diversity of all kinds makes us better, and it fills me with pride to see this school defend it.

It also makes it that much more jarring to see Harvard College admissions almost entirely shut out low-income applicants.

There are few official statistics on Harvard’s economic class demographics. But what little data we have is staggering: Analysis by Harvard economics professor Raj Chetty ’00 found that 67 percent of Harvard undergraduates come from the top 20 percent of the income distribution. Just 4.5 percent, meanwhile, come from the bottom 20 percent.

At a school that swears up and down that it cares deeply about diversity, there are almost 15 times as many rich undergraduates as poor ones.

Why?

That is the question I set out to answer when I began reporting this piece. In the process, I found some piercing answers, including revelations from the ongoing Students For Fair Admissions lawsuit that have gone almost entirely unnoticed in the press.

But, often, I was faced with suffocating silence, a total firewall against scrutiny coordinated by Harvard Public Affairs and Communications, the University’s press office. There is no honest way to tell this story that does not include the tireless efforts to keep Harvard’s class demographics invisible.

Only in the long shadow of these efforts can we understand how almost no one seems to recognize that Harvard hardly has low-income people.

Missing Data

Each year, like clockwork, Harvard admits a shiny new class, and up goes a page detailing its demographics.

“Harvard welcomes students from across the country and all over the world, with diverse backgrounds and far-ranging talents and interests,” begins the page for the Class of 2026, which breaks down its geography, ethnicity, and intended concentration.

Where you might expect to see information on class, you will instead find an opaquely-titled section about, um, “Typical financial aid package for scholarship holders.”

If you search harder, you might discover the College’s Financial Aid Fact Sheet, which offers a few cagey approximations, including that “More than 20% of Harvard parents have total incomes less than $85,000” — a proportion that feels decidedly less triumphant when one realizes this benchmark is almost $15,000 above real median household income in the United States. This data, while more vague, is consistent with Chetty’s work.

Harvard spokesperson Rachael Dane declined to comment on Chetty’s findings.

A Bump ‘On Behalf of the Wealthy’

For this piece, I spoke with admissions expert Richard D. Kahlenberg ’85 and Duke economics professor Peter S. Arcidiacono, both of whom were paid by SFFA to provide evidence for its admissions lawsuit against Harvard. Harvard’s paid expert, economist David E. Card, declined an interview request, citing the pending Supreme Court case.

Per court documents, Arcidiacono and Card constructed — and Kahlenberg could access — models of Harvard admissions based on data from every application for the classes of 2014 through 2019. With this privileged access, each of these men gained rare insight into admissions practices about which Harvard is notoriously close-lipped.

While their analyses have been cited widely regarding the Harvard College Admissions Office’s approach to race, they also tell an uncomfortable story of an admissions office too indifferent to inequalities in pre-college opportunity.

In interviews for this piece, the SFFA experts Arcidiacono and Kahlenberg both said that Harvard applies a small admissions ‘bump’ for those that it identifies as socioeconomically disadvantaged.

“It’s a very modest boost,” said Kahlenberg. “Smaller than legacy, smaller than faculty preferences, much smaller than race, smaller than athletic preferences.”

Arcidiacono’s analysis put a finer point on it. Using statistical interactions, he found that, on average, the bump given to disadvantaged applicants comes out to about half the racial diversity bump given to Black applicants. Hispanic applicants get a bump for disadvantage only about two-thirds as large as the average disadvantaged applicant, and, staggeringly, Black applicants hardly get any bump for disadvantage at all.

While these correlations do not imply causation, they raise concerns that Harvard Admissions is conflating adjustment for racial inequity with adjustment for class disadvantage.

In his analysis for Harvard, Card criticized Arcidiacono’s choice to interact disadvantage and race while excluding hundreds of other possible interactions, defending his own choice to exclude this interaction as “a more transparent approach that requires fewer subjective judgments.”

Replying to these criticisms by email, Arcidiacono pointed to an early internal analysis by Harvard’s Office of Institutional Research that also indicates Black applicants receive a smaller bump for disadvantage. And, Arcidiacono noted, he found similar racial variation in how the University of North Carolina — the other defendant in the SFFA cases — adjusts for first-generation status.

Both SFFA experts also said that a host of wealth-biased factors unrelated to ability — college counselors, bespoke extracurriculars, and more — constitute a de facto bump for well-off students substantially larger than the formal bump given for disadvantage.

“Harvard does employ class-based affirmative action,” Kahlenberg concluded. “It’s just, mostly it does it on behalf of the wealthy.”

‘Well Beyond the Scope of the Harvard Admissions Office’

The search for how Harvard internally justifies these socioeconomic disparities proved far more difficult than finding the smoking gun in the statistics.

Through a spokesperson, the Harvard College Admissions Office declined to interview for this piece, so I went to its peers. The undergraduate admissions offices of Yale University, Princeton University, Columbia University, Cornell University, and Brown University declined interview requests for this article, while those of MIT, Stanford University, University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth College, and the University of North Carolina did not respond to multiple requests.

I also sought out individual Harvard affiliates in hopes that they might speak more freely.

Several former admissions affiliates tersely declined interview requests, and a number of current admissions officers notified HPAC. Multiple student recruiters for the Undergraduate Minority Recruitment Program did not reply to interview requests.

Ultimately, only two former admissions officers, long gone from Cambridge, were willing to go on the record with me: Jennifer D. Carey ’78, a senior admissions and financial aid officer from 1982 to 1992, and John V. Fraire ’77, an undergraduate admissions officer from 1978 to 1983.

Though Harvard admissions is formally need-blind, both Carey and Fraire indicated that they could broadly sense an applicant’s socioeconomic status during their reviews. Since the admissions lawsuit began, Harvard has acknowledged as much, noting in one report that “there is no reason to believe that Harvard currently struggles to identify low-income students.”

The problem, then, isn’t information. It’s how Harvard chooses to respond.

While they described working-class background as a positive factor, both Carey and Fraire conveyed that Harvard College’s admissions office did not see itself as responsible for combatting inequities in the wider world.

Carey, who directs an education non-profit in low-income Worcester, Mass., told me “we fund education in this country based on property taxes, which bakes inequity into the system at the beginning.” But, she continued, “This is an issue that is well beyond the scope of the Harvard admissions office.”

Fraire concurred.

“I don’t think Harvard — the admission staff — saw that their responsibility was to create economic equity,” he said. “We all had just a different conception or various conceptions of what a qualified student was.”

‘Excellence Can and Should Be Found in All Backgrounds’

Thirty-some-odd years later, statements by Harvard echo this opportunity-blind conception of merit. Compromising this standard seems its primary objection to diversifying economically.

In 2017, a committee comprising Admissions Dean William R. Fitzsimmons ’67, College Dean Rakesh Khurana, and then-FAS Dean Michael D. Smith was formed to study the feasibility of alternatives to race-based affirmative action. By 2018, the so-called Smith Committee had generated a report on its findings, which provides perhaps the clearest official insight into how Harvard thinks about class.

The report relies on results from Card, Harvard’s expert economist, to assess one race-neutral admissions option that would increase the bump for socioeconomic disadvantage.

What did Card find? By increasing the boost it gives for low socioeconomic status threefold, Harvard could achieve a 140 percent increase in the number of disadvantaged students.

That should stagger you. In one fell swoop, Harvard could add class-based affirmative action to its existing, race-conscious system and achieve, likely for the first time, both racial and economic diversity. It could fundamentally change the lives of thousands more disadvantaged students and the countless more they would touch.

The Smith Committee wasn’t moved by this prospect. This change, it found, would “run a significant risk of diminishing the academic excellence of the class.”

Per Card’s model, the three-fold increase I’ve just described means only a one percent decrease in average SAT score and a five percent decrease in accepted applicants receiving a top rating for academic ability.

The report declined to cite evidence that SAT score or academic rating meaningfully predict success for low-income students at Harvard. Conveniently, the Smith Committee report also declines to mention that average GPA — by some estimates, five times better than standardized tests at predicting college graduation — would actually increase by 0.3 percent.

Harvard Graduate School of Education professor Anthony A. Jack, who studies how class background shapes experiences in higher education, couldn’t disagree more with this conception of merit.

“You’re talking about, ‘Oh, well, this student didn’t do that.’ Well, what if that student had a full time job ever since they were in ninth grade?” said Jack, who was himself a low-income student at an elite college. “If we think that only these objective measures matter, we’re gonna find ourselves always equating something with money.”

Jack raises an important point: Beyond representational considerations, if we are serious about finding the most impressive applicants, then we should care about adjusting properly for opportunity.

“I think we should try to have a genuine meritocracy, where we find talented students and, in looking at academic records, consider the hurdles that they overcame,” said Kahlenberg, SFFA’s expert. “Considering socioeconomic obstacles overcome is more meritocratic than ignoring them.”

Compare Kahlenberg’s and Jack’s words with the Smith Committee’s. Rejecting the proposal to increase the disadvantage bump, the committee said “excellence can and should be found in all backgrounds.”

Are we to take the College’s current demographics — in which 15 times more rich students go to Harvard than poor ones — as the application of this principle? Does Harvard really believe that the vast majority of the excellent resides in the top 20 percent of the income distribution?

Or does Harvard only care about the kind of excellence that correlates with wealth?

A Diverse Harvard

Lost beneath the panic over affirmative action’s coming demise, the hidden tragedy of the ongoing admissions saga has been to make it seem as though class-conscious admissions is an alternative to race-conscious admissions. In reality, we need both.

My point is not that there is one inarguable conclusion about how to fairly structure Harvard admissions; it’s that the current system has failed to achieve economic diversity, which is a state of affairs we must reject and improve.

Not only does this failure fly in the face of many ideals we hold dear — fairness, diversity of perspective, social mobility — but it threatens racial diversity too, by casting doubt on the sincerity of Harvard’s commitment to diversity writ large.

So, if you care about fairness, equity, or diversity in admissions, apply your principles in the same measure to class as to race. Challenge the College to commit to transparency in admissions, to diversify economically, to respond to the struggles low-income students face by investing ambitiously in their support — not by shutting them out. Fight for an admissions system that reflects the true situation of identity in America, where class and race, together, produce our experiences.

Demand a diverse Harvard.

I cannot accept that this magical school should keep its doors closed to low-income people. You shouldn’t either.

Tommy Barone ’25, a Crimson Editorial Comp Director, is a Social Studies concentrator in Currier House.

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