Leftists are addicted to social engineering, and in the realm of education, they have been doing that through racial preferences (“affirmative action”) for the last 50 years. But some of them have been leery of racial preferences, correctly observing that the beneficiaries are almost always minority students from pretty affluent families who’d have fared well without any preferences and also provide only optical diversity.

Now that the Supreme Court has finally said “no” to racial preferences, the social engineers are pushing socio-economic preferences harder than ever, and starting to get their way.

As history professor Jonathan Bean writes in this Independent Institute post, UC San Diego is moving to such preferences:

If you are a strong student at UC San Diego with middle-class college-educated parents and wish to transfer to a “selective major” (engineering, data science, public health), the university isn’t interested in you. A new directive gives one point each for California residency, first-generation college-student status, low income, and a GPA above 3.0 — a low bar for “selective” admissions. This is the latest instance of exclusionary practices in the name of “equity.” Merit takes a back seat to socioeconomic status. Your family tree matters more than your academic performance. California has taken a page from the population-classification schemes of now-defunct Marxist regimes.

This sort of thing will no doubt be the next front in the war between colorblind merit and the Left’s unquenchable thirst for social engineering to maintain political control.