In the fall of 2016, Pomona College, an elite liberal arts school in Southern California, recruited Elvis Kahoro, an African American student from a working class family, according to a recent story in The New York Times.

Kahoro had an impressive application with 13 AP classes and over 1,000 hours of community service; he was more than qualified for an elite institution like Pomona.

Beyond granting him admission, however, Pomona also gave him nearly the full cost of the $49,000 per year tuition, as well as the $15,000 cost of boarding, $900 for textbooks, his flights to campus during the end of senior year and even provided money for trips to visit family.

This case and others like it raise many questions. How far should affirmative action go? Should schools be going to such lengths to recruit minorities?

While this roughly $65,000 spent by Pomona allowed Kahoro to attend the college of his dreams, it may have deprived others of theirs. According to USA Today, many students fit into a category of people whose families’ annual income is too high to qualify for federal financial aid, but too low to cover the cost of one or more college educations.

In order to finance their tuition, these students must extract a “cocktail of loans,” which have to be painstakingly paid off later. Instead of using an excessively large amount of money to recruit one person as if he were a star player on a sports team, this money could be more evenly spread to several applicants.

Although affirmative action was undeniably put into motion with good intentions, schools have employed it unethically in the past. For instance, in 1978, Allan Bakke was denied admission to UC Davis Medical School even though his achievements, including test scores such as the MCAT and college GPA, showed that he was more qualified than many of the minority applicants that were accepted.

The school had established a quota which reserved 16 out of every 100 spots for students of minority ethnicities, and as a result, discriminated against Caucasian students, violating the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause. This well-known case, Bakke v. Regents of the University of California, established that there was, in fact, a way for affirmative action to be unconstitutional. What’s to say that extravagant spending on one desired student isn’t one of these instances?                                                                 

One proposition to combat this inequality would be to provide more support for low-income students during the middle school and high school stages of their education in order to reach the root of the problem. The need for this type of action is evident. Back in 2014, some California students sued the state over teacher tenure, according to youthradio.org. Nine student plaintiffs testified that teacher tenure harmed students, and there was ample evidence to prove it.

The plaintiffs traveled to Los Angeles to gather closing statements from several students. Senior Brandon DeBose Jr. and Elizabeth Vergara recounted stories of the teachers they had encountered, including “one that let kids smoke pot and another who called Latino students ‘housecleaners’ and ‘cholos.’”  

In order to counteract these horrendous learning environments, universities like Pomona could use their money to support students with programs paralleling the UC’s Early Academic Outreach Program. The EAOP’s goal is to provide low-income students with the same resources received by those from affluent families. Free PSAT and SAT prep, help filling out applications and financial aid forms, individualized college counseling, and enrichment classes on Saturdays are just a few of the resources offered by the EAOP.

Though taking this course of action is just a matter of ethics for private institutions like Pomona, for public colleges, it is essential. Public colleges simply do not have the budget to dedicate so much of their finances to persuade applicants into attending their schools.

Additionally, though Kahoro is an exception, affirmative action often sets up students to fail. As The Daily Signal states, “though they may be well-intentioned, these policies put bright, talented students at the bottom of an academic All-Star heap.”  According to “A ‘Dubious Expediency’: How Race-Preferential Admissions Policies on Campus Hurt Minority Students,” minority students admitted to schools that they otherwise should have been denied acceptance from had it not been for affirmative action on average do worse than those admitted based purely on merit.

A study conducted by UCLA law professor Richard Sander and UCLA statistician Roger Bolus indicated that “students with credentials more than one standard deviation below their science peers at college are about half as likely to end up with science bachelor degrees, compared with similar students attending schools where their credentials are much closer to, or above, the mean credentials of their peers.” These students would do much better at a school where they did not have to struggle.

This ties back to the Bakke case. Bakke, who had barely not made the cut, had a college GPA of 3.46, whereas the average affirmative action student at UC Davis Medical School had a GPA of 2.88, which is substantial proof that these students were at a severe disadvantage.

It is apparent that the target spending in some affirmative action cases improve the lives of a few selective applicants in order to serve as “poster children” of underrepresented ethnicities. While these students may receive an ideal education, it is unethical to deny the opportunity to other equally or more deserving applicants.

The better solution would be to use the finances of these affluent schools to either distribute the money more evenly among applicants or to make educational resources readily available in areas where poor and minority students don’t have the chance at decent educations.