Colleges should disclose debt and scholarship data by race.

Evidence

The late Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis said “sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants,” and such exposure, at a minimum, should be a tax-exemption requirement for nonprofit colleges and universities. Colleges must publish annually, on their websites, debt loads and scholarship information by race, as well as by family income and wealth. Recent research discussed in The New York Times offered a look at how some colleges (notably the City University of New York, where 24 percent of the student body is black) effectively bring lower-income students into higher-income classes, but was focused on economic and not racial diversity. When the research leaves race out of the conversation, we ignore the struggles and challenges faced by the black middle class, which then contributes to the view that solving class issues will resolve most black problems. We need detailed information about both race and income if we are serious about making college an engine of growth for all. — Dorothy A. Brown, The Whiteness of Wealth, 341

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Mirrors the book’s central evidence-hole strategy (IRS publishes no tax data by race): she demands colleges publish by race precisely because the omission lets class-only analysis dominate — the same argumentative move as the IRS hole.
• XREF: Her demand that data be disaggregated by race rather than folded into income echoes the entire book’s refrain that income is not wealth.