Golden medal with the number 1

SRISHTI BHATIA

India

global winners 2026
Argumentative

Colour-Blind or Wilfully Blind: The True Cost of Race-Neutral Admissions

At 11:43 p.m., Laila is still awake at the kitchen table under the flickering lights, her SAT prep book balanced with the unpaid electricity bill her mother forgot to tuck away in the drawer. The next morning, she'll take the bus to her public high school, with shared textbooks and dreams of AP classes.

Meanwhile, in California, James finishes his weekly tutoring session before heading to his research lab internship, thanks to a word put in by a family friend.

His SAT score will be higher than Laila's. His résumé will be stretched longer.

When their applications arrive at the same admissions desk, the numbers tell one story. But do they tell the right one? Do they acknowledge Laila's struggles: the fact that she is a woman, a person of colour, both at once, and yet more still?

On the surface, a meritocratic system is the ideal: reward effort and talent, regardless of background. And it would be - if the inputs were equal. But this view ignores a fundamental caveat: merit itself is shaped by opportunity, and opportunity is not distributed equally across race. In a world that has historically restricted access to education for minorities, a system that measures only outcomes, without accounting for the conditions that produced them, rewards inequality. Research provides critical evidence that the intersection between race and income plays a vital role: a study from economists at Opportunity Insights found that children of the wealthiest one per cent of Americans were thirteen times more likely to score above 1300 on the SAT than children from low-income families [1].

This unequal access is deeply rooted in systemic issues, primarily because it is a product of unequal schooling. As American public schools are funded through local property taxes, the wealth of a neighbourhood automatically determines the funding a school receives [2]. But neighbourhood wealth in America has been historically skewed by racial policy, particularly redlining and the Jim Crow laws. Following the turn of the 20th century, the American government denied mortgages to Black families, preventing them from building generational wealth through homeownership [3, 4]. The Jim Crow laws only exacerbated this by mandating racial segregation and promoting employment discrimination, meaning that they effectively prevented Black people from accessing high-paying jobs [5, 6]. The legacy of these policies still pertains: studies find that African-American workers earn 30% less than white workers, effectively relegating them to a lower stratum of society [7].

But it doesn't just end at wealth - it continues at a biological level. Predominantly Black neighbourhoods that, due to these laws, were starved of investment, eventually became the sites of toxic, deadly environmental hazards due to dilapidated housing lined with lead paint, contaminated soil, and industrial waste [8]. Lead poisoning has severe, irreversible effects, with lead exposure in children impairing brain development, reducing IQ, and thus restricting educational opportunities. [9]. The intersection of race and lead poisoning is very real - Black children are twice as likely as white children to have unsafe blood lead levels, at double the concentration, within the same city [10].

And a child whose brain development has been compromised due to their zip code will also walk into a school that is defined by that same zip code. A 2024 report by researchers at the Albert Shanker Institute underscores this. It found that minority-race students are 3.5 times as likely as white students to be in districts with chronic underfunding. This directly maps onto fewer qualified teachers, no AP courses, and no academic structure that builds a competitive university application [11].

Racial policies, then, didn't just determine where Black families could live. It created a gap that a student would never be able to reach - before they even took their first breath. Evidently, a colourblind admissions system in this landscape does not level the playing field. Instead, it sees the result of a biased one and rewards it as though it were merit.

This is why race-conscious admissions remain necessary: not because race determines potential, but because in a society where race still predicts the quality of an individual's education, ignoring it becomes wilful ignorance of essential historical context - even when reckoning with why even the most favoured alternative falls short.

Critics often argue that a system prioritising socioeconomic equity would suffice. If Laila's school is underfunded, the solution is to fund it, and that help needn't know her race to reach her [7]. This argument is not unsubstantiated: when UC Berkeley dropped race-conscious admissions, it aggressively pursued class-based alternatives instead, and became one of the most economically and racially diverse selective colleges in the United States. If poverty is the mechanism through which racism operates, targeting poverty might be enough, it seems [17].

The truth, however, is that this fundamentally misunderstands the problem. Studies show that race was a significant predictor of acceptance to a first-choice college, with Black and Asian students facing odds 46–59% lower than white peers, while socioeconomic status showed no significant association. Race, unlike income, is immediately visible and, therefore, subject to unconscious bias in ways that a class-prioritised system is structurally blind to [12, 5].

Furthermore, financial aid and need-based scholarships already exist to address income barriers. But even these pro-equity systems are skewed by racial bias. White students receive 76% of institutional merit-based awards, despite making up only 62% of the student population [8]. This asymmetry is only exacerbated by the fact that white students have a poverty rate of only ~7%, in sharp contrast to minority communities, which have, on average, one in five people in poverty. Even equity-designed systems, then, reproduce the very inequity they intended to correct [13].

A subtler objection challenges not the alternatives, but racial equity itself: that placing students in academically mismatched environments depresses performance. This argument has been dismantled on methodological grounds, with studies telling a different story: Black students admitted to selective institutions graduated at strong rates and achieved outcomes matching or exceeding those of their white peers across income and professional attainment. What this argument does, then, is wrongly blame individuals, rather than the system that has historically withheld the tools it can give to the students who need them. Thus, it proposes to remedy inequality by restricting access - simply a rendition of the old issue [19].

Even a class-based system, then, fails to reckon with race accurately - but the problem runs deeper still than flawed alternatives. It runs through the framework of meritocracy itself.

The word was originally introduced as satire rather than a genuine framework to apply to admission systems. Popularised in 1958 by Michael Dunlop Young, he used the word as a pejorative to criticise societies that judged by simply considering ability. Young argued that a meritocracy would only ever look fair - in practice, only the privileged could access the education required to perform well on measures of "merit," making the system an elegant mechanism for exclusion disguised as objectivity, particularly as systems that insist on their own neutrality tend to effectively conceal the systemic advantages that produce merit in the first place. This makes the claim of objectivity simply harder to name, and thus challenge. Ultimately, the word was supposed to be the idea's gravestone - and yet, somehow, turned into its pedestal [8, 14, 15].

And even if one accepts meritocracy as a system, that still fails to address the gaping holes in the structure of the framework. This is because the criteria aren't neutral: everything is filtered through a racial lens.

Consider what this looks like in practice: a Black applicant who lists "Student Government President" may be read as assertive, while a white applicant is read as a natural leader. The word on the page is the same. The race attached to it is not, and neither is the interpretation. A system that refuses to name race does not eliminate this dynamic from the room. Research on medical school committees found that all admission evaluators displayed significant implicit white preference, with 21% reporting that it directly impacted their decisions. [18].

The system, then, simply ensures no one is held directly accountable for this bias - and accountability becomes even more complicated when we ask who this framework is built to see in the first place. If admissions centre anti-racism, does it not risk erasing the experiences of other marginalised groups?

The answer lies in intersectionality, which emphasises that individual experiences with discrimination cannot be boiled down to an identifiable element of a person. Those elements of a person's identity do not operate in isolation - they compound. The data only emphasises this: while white women earn 79 cents for every dollar earned by a white man, Black and Hispanic women earn only 62 and 54 cents, respectively [8, 16].

Discrimination is not monolithic - and intersectionality demands addressing these nuances rather than ignoring them. A class-based system sees the 54 cents and calls it poverty. A race-conscious one sees why it is 54 cents, and not 79 - and that disparity doesn't begin at the workplace. It begins at the place that determines who gets there.

After all, Laila is not just low-income. She is not just a woman. She is all of these things at once - and a system that cannot hold that has already failed her before she picks up her pen.

And so when Laila and James' applications arrive at the same desk, fairness will not be turning away from the truth - but having the courage to correct it.

Bibliography:

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