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Class Matters

The Fight to Get Beyond Race Preferences, Reduce Inequality, and Build Real Diversity at America’s Colleges

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Class Matters Open the full-size image

Contributors

By Richard D. Kahlenberg

Formats and Prices

Price

$32.00

Price

$42.00 CAD

Format

Format:

  1. Hardcover $32.00 $42.00 CAD
  2. ebook $19.99 $25.99 CAD

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How a new class-based approach to college admissions can produce economic and racial diversity alike– and greater fairness.

Richard Kahlenberg has been on a lifelong journey to expand social and economic opportunity and provide a much wider group of people the chance to have a place at the table. In this highly personal and deeply researched book, he dramatically and persuasively illustrates that class disadvantage should be the determining factor for how a broader group of people gain admittance to higher education and the opportunity to “swim in the river of power”.

While elite universities claim to be on the side of social justice, the dirty secret of higher education in the United States is that the decades-long focus on racial diversity provides cover for an admissions system that mostly benefits the wealthy and shuts out talented working-class students. How to rectify the resulting skyrocketing economic inequality and class antagonism is a question of profound moral and political importance.  

Kahlenberg has long worked with prominent civil rights leaders on housing and school integration, but he made a controversial decision to go over to the “other side” and provide research and testimony that helped lead to the controversial Supreme Court decision of 2023 that ended racial preferences. Ironically, he shows, this decision could actually result in a progressive policy outcome – from one that benefited the upper-middle class to one that helps working-class students, a disproportionate share of whom are Black and Latino.

Genre:

On Sale
Mar 25, 2025
Page Count
384 pages
Publisher
PublicAffairs
ISBN-13
9781541704237

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Richard D. Kahlenberg

About the Author

Richard D. Kahlenberg is director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute and teaches at George Washington University. Known as “the nation’s chief proponent of class-based affirmative action in higher education admissions,” his work has been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the New Republic, and the Atlantic. He is the author or editor of 18 books, most recently Excluded: How Snob Zoning, NIMBYism, and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don’t See.

 

Learn more about this author