Attention high-school seniors: Deadlines are coming up! Polish your dream-college applications, hit send, and hope the admissions game isn’t rigged with “race proxies”!

To stay ahead of the curve, consider including your “subjective social status”  — what’s good enough for the governor of California should be good enough for admissions officers.

Education gatekeepers are always hunting for fresh metrics to cherry-pick students, especially after the Supreme Court’s 2023 Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard ruling banned racial preferences in college admissions.

Some elite schools produced expected racial shifts post-SFFA, others amazingly kept racial proportions similar to pre-SFFA. Was this by feigning compliance using stealthier “socioeconomic status” preferences?

“Socioeconomic” is deceptive. It sneaks in the term “economic” to win over generous Americans who support helping those with genuine financial need.

Then “socio” takes over, shunting aside tax returns and bank statements apparently to favor racial outcomes.

Big-data reverse engineering using social factors such as “single-female-headed household,” “neighborhood housing turnover rate” and “criminal-justice involvement” turns out to predict race quite well.

But SES is just the beginning. It may be facially race-neutral yet doubles as a proxy, but at least it uses ostensibly objective social attributes.

Next, with subjective factors, we’re entering a bold new frontier: “

© New York Post