Just like many other things that need to be revamped to reflect the massive disparity in resources, college admissions should absolutely contain criteria based on parents income. Since parents income plays a larger role in determining success than merit in the modern US at least, colleges could just admit based on test scores and grades within income levels and have a pyramid structure that mirrors the population rather than cream of the crop socioeconomic.

You can be white and poor as fuck and have almost all of the economic, educational and social disadvantages of a minority with the exception of skin color, which is exactly why the right wing has focused their messaging on poor, uneducated white folks as there are a shitload of them and they know our systems aren’t aimed to support and target them for aid, mostly because their disadvantages are economic. Despite having it better than minorities because they don’t face skin color discrimination, poor whites face many of the same challenges and Dems haven’t done much to help them in the last 40 years between NAFTA and the federal minimum wage not moving for the last 15 years.

I think colleges are scared to actually diversify (community colleges, city universities and some exceptions aside) because they know their rich, largely undiverse) donors would revolt.