Via Outside the Beltway:

In an ideal world, the nation’s elite schools would enroll the most qualified students. But that’s not how it works. Applicants whose parents are alums get special treatment, as do athletes and rich kids. Underrepresented minorities are also given preference. Thirty years of affirmative action have changed the complexion of mostly white universities; now about 13 percent of all undergraduates are black or Latino. But most come from middle- and upper-middle-class families. Poor kids of all ethnicities remain scarce. A recent study by the Century–Foundation found that at the nation's 146 most competitive schools, 74 percent of students came from upper-middle-class and wealthy families, while only about 5 percent came from families with an annual income of roughly $35,000 or less.

This was my experience as well: Most the blacks I knew at my fairly-elite university were, in fact, from wealthy families. (My middle-class family was actually poorer than most of theirs, now that I think about it.)

This is a consistent result of such studies: "affirmative action" disproportionately helps the rich and upper-middle-class, and tends to discriminate against the poor. In this debate, "skin color" became a proxy (substitute) for talking about economic status. The reasoning went that minorities are more likely to be poor, so let's help minorities.

The problem is that when you create race-based policies, it is the rich and upper-class who are positioned best to take advantage of them. (Thanks, Harry.) This is true around the world: it is wealthy Dalits, for example, who are best able to take advantage of India's affirmative-action policies, not their poorer brethren who need it most.

Among the consequences of this situation are that (1) many reserved places go unfilled, (2) those places that have been filled have been filled disproportionately by the more fortunate members of the less fortunate groups and (3) those members of these groups who have gone on to higher education have usually gone to the less demanding institutions..., taken longer to graduate, and dropped out much more often than other students.

If you want to help the poor, there's a much simpler and more effective way to do it -- one which also happens not to be racist: Help the poor. If it's true that one minority is poorer than another, you'll then be helping that minority more. And when that's not true, why should we favor of one student who has a preferred skin color over a much poorer student who doesn't? Should we really favor an upper-class black student from New York over an impoverished white child from Appalachia because the former has the preferred skin tone? Are we going to punish certain impoverished children because they were born with the "wrong" appearance, through no fault of their own?

In America's "progressive" universities, the answer is "Yes".

"Social justice" always means doing quite a lot of individual injustice.