<p>I'm not trying to protect a white "minority" -- I was simply pointing out that white students are underrepresented at University of California system schools, which they are.</p>
<p>Also, "that doesn't make your argument right?" What argument? I didn't even MAKE an argument -- I simply stated that Asian Americans are overrepresented -- sometimes grossly so (gross not being a negative descriptor but a general adjective about the magniture of their overrepresentation) and that is causing some groups of students to be underrepresented, which includes white students and more severely Latino and black students.</p>
<p>SSobick, you have yet to demonstrate how holistic admissions disregards the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.</p>
<p>The EPC says, "No state shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." The Supreme Court has already ruled that quota systems in college admissions are unconstitutional, but using affirmative action programs that give equal access to minorities is constitutional and okay to do. So it would be wrong, under the Equal Protection Clause, to have two different admissions systems -- one for white students and one for underrepresented miniorities (as UC-Davis did under this system), but not necessarily wrong to use race as a factor in admissions, as the Court ruled that universities have an interest in maintaining the diversity of their student body.</p>
<p>Justice Powell wrote in his opinion that race could be used as a "plus factor" (just like playing an obscure instrument or being fluent in 3 languages), and Harvard University's admission process (which uses holistic reviews in its admissions as a form of affirmative action) was submitted as an example of a constitutional program. The Court later upheld the idea that using race in admissions as a factor is constitutional in Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger. Awarding "points" to minority students on the basis of race in a formulaic approach to admissions is unconstitutional. However, considering race more abstractly was not unconstitutional.</p>
<p>Quota systems and points systems like the ones UC-Davis and University of Michigan used are not only discriminatory and unconstitutional, they do not address the material problem of underrepresented minorities being underrepresented. By banning quota systems and other forms of unconstitutional preference, schools have been forced to enable other programs that improve minority students chances -- like recruiting excellent minority students from early on, establishing summer programs and enrichment programs for minority students, and forming aid programs that enable the truly outstanding minority students to go to the schools they desire.</p>
<p>Likewise, the issue here is not to use pure numbers -- "Oh, there are too many Asians, we need to scale back." The problem with this is that there's no examination of WHY Asian students are so overrepresented at these schools (beyond the stereotypical "Well, Asians are really good at math and science and they just do better in school than other students.")</p>