By Ginger Young, September 6, 2023
Opinion, The 74 Million
The Supreme Court ruling that struck down affirmative action in college admissions threatens to deny countless students of color a viable path to postsecondary education that is the hallmark of the American dream of opportunity for all.
The need to mobilize against this threat is urgent.
It is imperative to meet the “intergenerational transmission of inequality” that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote about in her dissent with an intergenerational transmission of hope and opportunity. This means supercharging families’ ability to envision and plan for higher education with tangible workarounds to the systemic inequities that affirmative action was intended to correct. And this work needs to start early, while fragile aspirations are being formed.
Children’s savings accounts are a proven strategy that works. Even before the ruling, dozens of equity-focused organizations, municipalities and even entire states, California and Maine among them, had taken steps to nurture, validate and encourage parents’ long-term goals for their young children by providing them with this resource.