Attention: Affirmative Action Haters

Chance Me / Match Me!
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<p>I think that affirmative action should be based on socioeconomic status more than race.</p>

<p>Being poor, no matter what race you are, is a hardship for you.</p>

<p>I'm black, and while affirmative action benefits me, in theory, I don't think it should. I'm an immigrant, I have immigrant parents, and yes, I'm black, but I am far from poor and living in the ghetto. I don't have those hardships that affirmative action was created to correct. </p>

<p>I do think it's unfair that people, even those who know my SATs and go to school with me, tell me that I will get into college because I am black. Not because I'm qualified, oh no, but because of my race. But I suspect that kind of situation will always be a problem.</p>

<p>That's just my two cents on an issue I usually don't talk about.</p>

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<p>I want reparations for how badly the irish were treated, when will I get that, huh?
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_American#Discrimination_and_prejudice%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_American#Discrimination_and_prejudice&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>If you wanna keep AA, then AA for the irish-americans as well, or the asians(do they get the same treatment as blacks/hispanics)</p>

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<p>meesh maybe you have really crappy people around you but i think what theyre saying, if they really do know your sat scores and stuff, i think theyre saying like hell youd be such a great applicant anyways, but now that you get to check that box that says black youre like DEFINITILY in, theyre just ****ed off that they dont get it</p>

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<p>gender should be the only discriminitory factor in college admissions...now guys, i know this is hard to stomach, and you may be yelling already, but think about it:
women have always been lesser than men, from day 1 when the first female was smaller, weaker, and physically lesser than her male counterpart...throughout history, we've fallen into the routine of taking the lesser skilled jobs that are more "homely" (accounting, nursing, education, english, ect) to match our traditional housewive roles, whereas the men have taken the burely jobs (engineering, doctors, mechanics, ect). Women are the cooks, cleaners, and take care of the children, while the men bring home the money, build cars and airplanes, and run the countries of the world. Its extremely hard to break out of that mold simply because physically, gender seperates people more than any other physical characteristic. A white women will still have the same "tradititonal roles" as a black women, and a hispanic male will have the same male roles as a purple-skinned man.<br>
Now do I believ this gender-bias is one way in favor of women? Not at all. If a man wants to persue education or nursing, he should be able to without any hardship from his female counterparts, and should be given credit for wanting to enter a female-dominated field. At the same time, us women in engineering and such should be given a break, because its harder than anything to be a 1 in 6 minority (average women/male ratio in engineering majors).
Race is not an issue anymore...the 60s are over...but women will forever be different than men, and the gender differences between the two should be acknowledged in college admissions</p>

<p>on a side note, i have a friend who had a 3.5 HS GPA, 1280 (somewhere around there) SAT, pretty good ECs (interned during second semester for senator kennedy, class VP 2 yrs, involved in rotary commitee, various other community service organizations)...got into (hold your breath): Penn, Cornell, Darmouth, Duke, VT, UVA, and William&Mary...
want to know why? black female who is technically a political refugee from Somalia, moved to Kenya at 4, then US at 7, not a US citizen</p>

<p>she ended up at Duke, and is doing quite well</p>

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<p>josh_ak....</p>

<p>i totally agree with you on the fact that native americans were treated horribly...i think they should also benefit from affirmative action or if not some other thing that will help them. the only reason i did not mention them was because there are hardly any left. what like 20,000 are still around? in the grand scheme of things, they are not thought about much due to there small numbers (how many colleges have over a 1% native american population).</p>

<p>in my post i said "directed" at blacks...that does not mean i think no one else should benefit from it. quite the contrary, i think it should help everyone it can. however i said what i said because we want as many people as possible to sucseed and since blacks are the largest minority in america, and in some cases worst off (except for native americans) we should help them...agree with me or not, but i feel getting poor people into college is a first step to dealing with drugs, babies, cleaning up ghettos, finding work for people, etc.. and i think that will help the country</p>

<p>but i do agree with what you said....good post</p>

<p>one more thing...i didnt say it was started becasue of slavery. I said since blacks were sort of "held back" during slavery it might be one of the reasons why as a "whole" (not all) they are in the condition they are</p>

<p>Aodh....</p>

<p>with the whole irish american thing....it would be different if those effects were felt by irish today...but they aren't</p>

<p>karl marks.....</p>

<p>that make no sense</p>

<p>"do "RESEARCH" before providing deep "THOUGHTS" ????</p>

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<p>hmm, since I started this whole debate, I think it is only fair to respond to what has been said in the past two days. Let me make one thing clear: I believe affirmative action actually works in favor for both minorities and white students. Someone asked to see the studies that say people become more intellectual and well-rounded when being around diversity. If you don't believe that is true, then just use common sense my friend. If a person is around the same type of people all his or her life, then of course, they are not going to learn different perspectives about the world. They will not learn about some of the very important experiences that others have had simply because they are talking to people exactly like them. Colleges do not only base admission decisions on test scores and G.P.A. (we know that). If they did, then colleges would use computers for admissions and they wouldn't need these types of things called admission officers. Some of the most successful schools such as UVA, Cornell, and UNC-Chapel Hill have african american percentages higher than 7%. Hmmm, you don't see affirmative action hurting these schools one bit. Schools such as UC-Berkeley and other UC schools have gotten rid of affirmative action. If no one has noticed, most of those UC schools have less than 2% black students. This makes for a very undiverse and boring enviornment if you ask me.
Let's be for real here, most of the people complaining about affirmative action screwing them over are the people that couldn't have gotten into their choice of schools anyway. Don't blame minorities that worked hard for what they got simply because you did not take care of business. It's wrong and it is unfair to discredit a fellow student's work for the sole reason of blaming affirmative action for their reason of getting into college.
Some of the schools with the highest percentage of blacks have around 20% (besides Historically black colleges and universities). That's not a high percentage if you really think about it. If you really want to be petty about affirmative action, well then let's kick the 3% of black students out of a local university I live near. In fact, let's kick out all the legacies, underqualified athletes, instrument players, boys with lower SAT scores, etc because all of these groups of people have somehow gained an advantage in college admissions be it innate or a learned trait. And by the way, yes, colleges are accepting more boys with lower SAT scores to try and even the ratio between females and males for the simple fact that the discrepancy between female SAT scores and male SAT scores is widening every year. So, if you're going to come on here and complain about AA, then you better complain about the other advantages in college admissions too.</p>

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<p>tia, i agree with most about what you said except...</p>

<p>UC is probably a bad example because its like 40% asian</p>

<p>also a school with a 20% black population would be pretty accurate for the real world considering about 20% of americans are black </p>

<p>but i do agree with most everything else, especially hypocrites who blast AA suporters and dont mention anything else like legacies, sports schlorships or other things which have a larger impact than AA</p>

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<p>"If people are going to come onto this board and complain about affirmative action, then they better start complaining about things such as underqualified athletes, rich kids, and legacies."</p>

<p>What's wrong with under-qualified athletes, rich kids, and legacies going to Ivy league schools? </p>

<p>Talented but academically under-qualified Athletes generate ticket sales and help bring a sense of school spirit. </p>

<p>Rich kids and legacies are benefits to the school because they are able to pay full tuition.</p>

<p>Who cares if they might not be up to par academically...they help the school by generating revenue</p>

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<p>Regardless of how you interpret it, affirmative action gives minorities an advantage (fair or unfair) in the college admissions process. My problem with this is that AA is dependent on a factor completely beyond our control and that is no reflection of the student's qualification.</p>

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<p>Bob has a point; college is simply a business.</p>

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<p>What worries me about Affirmative Action is that students at these AA colleges will come to think of "the black kids" or "the Hispanic kids" as unqualified or "stupider" than the rest of them. Moreover, I'm worried that the URM students who WOULD have gotten in without AA will be grouped into a "you must not be as smart as the white kids" category simply because of their skin color. </p>

<p>AA is about fighting racism (a very noble goal). But in the practice of giving minorities an advatage, it ends up enforcing the image that blacks/Hispanics are not as smart (which is completely false. I'm just saying how it might appear)... which is the opposite of what it was created for, right? I want URM to achieve, but I don't want their white peers to associate a stigma with skin color-- if Black Betty got in to Top School, she MUST be stupider than White Will, therefore all blacks must be stupider than whites. (Not necessarily consciously thinking this, but those thoughts could still be there.)</p>

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<p>AA is against asian...there are numerous studies that can prove it...specially the princeton studies that claim asians under AA get about a -50 on the SATs and 80% of the AA spots would hav been to asians if AA did not exist...why is asian minority everywhere except for college admissions</p>

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<p>agreed.....</p>

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<p>a few points</p>

<p>the OP says that we should go to our congressmen to solve the problem...but AA exists only in private institutions so that will have no impact</p>

<p>i too am curious to see the "studies" which say that an ethnically diverse classroom has that much of an impact on the learning. and what is to say that people from the same culture cant have different view points? i doubt that these studies are independent, but even if they aren't, realistically... there are a million factors that impact learning more than the nationality of the guy sitting next to you. the quality of the teacher is of much greater importance. how many times in class has someone from a different nationality said something that made us think "wow... now calculus finally makes sense". Of course it would be better to go to a school that wasn't 98 percent white, but even without AA, indians/asians/ and other qualified URM's would make up a good percentage. i think that the classroom's where one would learn the most would be one's filled with students who most deserve to be there.</p>

<p>also, AA takes away from the hardest working URM's who would have been accepted anyways, but are always looked down on because of the other URM's who got in</p>

<p>as for the legacy/athlete thing.... first of all, aa has been going on long enough where in the coming 5 - 10 years, the URM's will start having URM kids who also have legacy. </p>

<p>and as for athletes, many of them seem to be URM also. </p>

<p>What if Princeton said.... URM's make up the vast majority of our football team, and in order to create a team that had more diversity, we are going to start chosing white and asian football players only in order to create a better and more fun learning environment at practice? </p>

<p>how many URM's would take to the streets in discrimination protests???? </p>

<p>i'm not totally against AA, but the proponets of AA certainly will have a hard time addressing the arguments i have presented. </p>

<p>on these cc forums, we hear all the time about these students with a 2400 and 4.0 getting rejected from HYP. yet, i have yet to hear a URM who has great stats ever get rejected from a prestigous university. (now there is no need to angrily post that you can think of one example from one time where an URM got rejected from Harvard, and had to settle for Brown)</p>

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<p>Personally, I like the idea of affirmative action.</p>

<p>Until it starts to effect me.
haha</p>

<p>The thing is, atleast at my school, the people who are using their URM status for admission to elite colleges.. dont exactly fit the profile.</p>

<p>Isnt affirmative action supposed to bring students who encountered racial setbacks to colleges?</p>

<p>Well, there are two students at my school applying to the same schools as I am. Both of whom are about equally or less qualified than I am. However, they will be both checking the "hispanic" box. There are both, also, basically white. Their skin might be a tiny bit darker. I think theyre like 50 percent or something. They live in upper middle class suburbia, have perfect families, the whole white picket fence deal.</p>

<p>I know them personally and they didnt encounter anything that brings any sort of diversity to the table due to their "hispanic" background.</p>

<p>Will it be fair if they get in and take my spot?</p>

<p>we'll see what happens</p>

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<p>no, that is not fair overboard. affirmative action isn't perfect--i agree--but it's better than nothing. i sure hope this doenst spark another debate. i'm done. for any response needed, read my previous posts in this thread.</p>

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<p>I'm a black male in community college, and when I start applying to higher schools I'm NOT going to specify my race. If this means that I'll get into a second-tier state school as opposed the first tier schools in my state, so be it.</p>

<p>Tia, there's no longer any need for affirmative action of this sort. America has many schools that range from adequate to great--many schools to fit the range talents of students. As chance would have it, I was not the best student in high school. Ergo, I go to community college. Merit in action.</p>

<p>A op-ed piece I read by a black academic likened affirmative action to chemotherapy--it was necessary decades ago to treat the cancer of racism that was prevalent in many higher education institutions, but that treatment in and of itself was not very healthy. All that was needed was prompt and short application. Keep applying it, and you just cause more damage.</p>

<p>The fact of the matter is, affirmative action as it is currently practiced HURTS black students, because they're essentially told: Hey, you're not good enough to compete like everyone else, so here's a leg up! </p>

<p>Fact: It's FAR better for those black students to go to a less-than-great college by virtue of their own merit than it is for them to attend another institution that condescendingly let's them in. </p>

<p>Imagine not knowing that you weren't good enough to get in on your own, but needed "help." Wouldn't you think that anyone who didn't need that help has perfect reason to question your intelligence?</p>

<p>As a person of color who's thought about this, I don't want to give others the grounds to question my intelligence. </p>

<p>If "X" top-tier school has 10% african americans and hispanics, and without AA it only has 2% of those groups--ultimately, the latter is more beneficial to society and racial progress.</p>

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<p>cool beans... i applaud that post. it is ironic because you are the kind of URM that would make the elite colleges a better place, not simply taking a free "help" but wanting to earn everything you get. you are awesome</p>

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<p>ok so part of reason we have affirmative action is because of equal oppurtunity and because racism and discrimination still exist. but racism will always exist. people will always bring up the whole slavery thing in the past. so does this mean that AA will never be eased out of, when will that arguement card become invalid?
i'm curious though, are there any stats to how people who got in with the help of URM perform in these pretigious colleges? do they tend to lag behind or do they do about the same?</p>

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<p>i also applaud ur post coolbeans</p>