An Interesting View of Affirmative Action In College Admissions

I don't recall hearing it put this way before:

Affirmative action in college admissions has failed to help disadvantaged black students, writes Bertrand Cooper in The Atlantic. If the U.S. Supreme Court rules against racial preferences, low-income students will lose nothing. 

In 2020, 15 percent of Harvard's incoming class was black, equal to the percentage of young blacks in the U.S. population, he writes. But many came from high-earning immigrant or biracial families...

The wealth disparity -- and the likelihood of incarceration -- between the black upper class and the black poor is huge, writes Cooper. Class matters.

After affirmative action, he hopes for a system that treats gives (sic) disadvantaged students a better shot at upward mobility. 

I haven't thought this through yet so I'll just brainstorm a bit.  In general I'm against considering race at all; to me it's like considering eye color or height, an immutable characteristic that doesn't say anything about who the person is.  If changing from race-based admissions to class-based admissions is merely a way to get around the hoped-for end of affirmative action (the ruling will come down any day now), what would be the point?  If the hoped-for end of affirmative action brings about a class-based/income-based admissions regime, it could be a more honest and moral method as long as the admitted students still meet academic requirements.  I'm big on meeting standards.

Update, 6/29/23:  Now I guess we'll see what happens.