As a person of color who attended a predominantly working-class, Black and Brown high school, I know many kids who would not be affected by this summer’s Supreme Court decision  against affirmative action because they never considered going to college in the first place. America’s history of racism and economic injustice closed those doors to them long before the Court made its ruling. 

With affirmative action deemed unconstitutional, many are decrying the practice of legacy admissions as far more unfair. Recognizing that the practice exists explicitly to disproportionately benefit white and wealthy applicants, the call to ban legacy admissions and allow affirmative action would seem like a step in the right direction. But despite any perceived, marginal improvements to racial inequality, a race-conscious admissions system is not the answer to education disparity, even without legacy preference. These proposals take the focus away from the true perpetrators of inequality: an unjust, class-based society that props up a system of elite universities to serve it.

 If we truly want our college system to be more equitable, the solution is nationalization. Stripping away the special privileges bestowed upon the elite universities and putting them all entirely under the democratic control of the people will provide the funding and resources necessary to guarantee every citizen a free and quality education. 

Arguing to simply “fix” the admissions process accepts the existence of elite universities with astronomically high costs — and a stratified class society where the lower classes are predominantly minority communities. Most importantly, it presumes that society’s ability to provide quality education is limited. Put simply, these proposals accept the limitations of capitalism. 

In reality, the alleged scarcity of  jobs, resources and educational opportunities is entirely artificial, as it is hoarded by the ruling classes. Jobs like CEOs and Congress members are disproportionately taken up by Ivy+ graduates. Yale’s top employers, besides Yale itself, are among the wealthiest corporations on the planet, like McKinsey & Company, Meta Platforms, Inc., Amazon, Goldman Sachs and BlackRock to name a few. All the opportunities with power, wealth and influence are given to the graduates of the most elite universities. The working class is handed a sliver of economic power as a token to give the facade of democracy, spurring them into an endless controversy on how to divvy out that sliver and whatever scraps remain. This recent affirmative action ruling merely plays into this larger culture war, where political conversations are focused on matters which are meant to divide and disorient the working class. Meanwhile, legislation is passed behind closed doors, and workers’ lives keep getting worse.  

Undeniably, racism is entrenched in the DNA of modern capitalism and remains a tool of the exploiting class to divide the working class and maintain their rule. However, neither affirmative action nor ending legacy admissions addresses the root cause of inequality: capitalism. Thus, neither policy would improve the material conditions for marginalized communities as a whole. Race-conscious admissions affect a very small portion of students. For academic or financial reasons, most students do not have elite and Ivy+ colleges on their radar, and either get a job immediately after graduation or attend the less selective schools that don’t take applicants’ race into account. A third of all undergraduates attend community colleges, which offer open enrollment. With less than 200 universities using race-conscious admission, only 10,000-15,000 students a year receive degrees who might not have been otherwise accepted. That is equivalent to about 2 percent of all Black, Hispanic or Native American students in four-year colleges. 

This does not take into account that only 37 percent of Black and Hispanic students even make it to college at all. It is clear that these policies bring no tangible differences to these communities other than uplifting the lives of a select few, some of whom go on to oppress the very communities they came from. Goals of “representation,” the idea that these are good policies because they allow underrepresented groups to have a hand in controlling society’s major institutions, concedes that the universities who would implement these policies are simply pipelines into positions of power: corporate executives, powerful elected officials and so on. And as long as this scheme of a university system remains in a stratified class society, the majority of seats will always go to the wealthy, who have inherent advantages. Meanwhile, some minorities are permitted to diversify a few seats at the table, while the exploitative capitalist system continues unaddressed. 

The only truly fair solution is a nationalized university system, which guarantees free, quality college education to all. Education is a human right, and with the resources at our disposal today in the richest country in the world, nobody should be deprived of it. But because people are not guaranteed all that is required to live, only guaranteeing access to education is still an inadequate measure. You cannot go to college if you cannot afford rent, healthcare, groceries or whatever financial repercussions your family may face without a steady income. But how likely is it that the ruling class, which has more than enough resources, will fund a system of free, quality education alongside jobs, housing and healthcare? With this in mind, it may be time to reconsider who ought to wield the reigns of society — the wealthy capitalist graduates of elite universities or the workers?

SEBASTIAN WARD is a sophomore in Timothy Dwight College. Contact him at sebastian.ward@yale.edu.