<p>I'm Chinese, which isn't exactly an underrepresented minority. In fact, top colleges are flooded with applications from highly ambitious, hopeful Chinese brethren. On these forums it seems that people see being Chinese as a stigma when it comes to applying for top-tier schools. I doubt this is truly the case...</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/927219-race-college-admission-faq-discussion-8-a.html?highlight=Race+FAQ[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/927219-race-college-admission-faq-discussion-8-a.html?highlight=Race+FAQ</a></p>
<p>Well it’s a way of adjusting for unfair facts of life. If you were an unborn kid (not knowing who your parents would be, what race you would be, how wealthy your family would be, what kind of location you’d grow up in) and were asked to pick out your race, which would you choose knowing the common social patterns of America- that blacks, Hispanics, and others do not fare as well on average when it comes to things like healthcare, education, neighborhoods, etc. </p>
<p>You’d probably pick Asian or white. Well, since you got lucky and actually turned out Asian, it only makes sense that those who weren’t so lucky should get a boost at your expense when it comes to things like education.</p>
<p>I’m sorry senior0991 but you couldn’t be more wrong. Affirmative action is not something used by the universities to help disadvantaged students. Affirmative action is a policy that the university uses to increase its racial ‘diversity’. This benefits the university in many ways and is not an altruistic behavior. </p>
<p>The majority of those who benefit from affirmative action are either (1) wealth and/or (2) immigrants.</p>
<p>^That’s not why it was started, although that is the proclaimed justification for it now after Grutter. This justification was probably the only way to get a 5-4 decision in favor of Affirmative Action. </p>
<p>I was trying to avoid the common defense for Affirmative Action and take the less popular justification but defend it in a way that is intuitive.</p>
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</p>
<p>:confused:. Could you clarify?</p>
<p>It’s not BAD for college admissions. Does it really matter anyway? You can’t change your race so don’t worry about it.</p>
<p>No… it’s not. It’s a sad excuse Asians with high scores, standard ECs, and nothing special to set them apart whine about when they are rejected from schools with 10 percent admit rates. Well… their parents do anyway. </p>
<p>Taking legacy and athlete recruits into effect, whites and Asians have similar admit rates. I’m not saying AA doesn’t exist either. But it’s not to anyone’s disadvantage.</p>
<p>
How is it not? If you have two applicants for one final spot and one was a URM and the other was white, yet in all other respects they are equal, the URM will get admitted in a school with AA 100% of the time. That is to the disadvantage of the white guy, who if no AA existed would have had a 50/50 chance. </p>
<p>Clearly the above scenario would never happen. But there are some students who do get admitted that would not have been had they been of a different race. This means that there are some non-URM students waitlisted who would have gotten in had AA not been in place. If the school doesn’t go to the waitlist that year, those students are rejected when they would have been admitted had no AA policy been in place. More spots for URMs necessitates less spots for everyone else. </p>
<p>It may just be a few students or so, but they are directly disadvantaged because of AA.</p>
<p>Now I am not saying that AA is a bad policy. Far from it. I am qualifying your statement.</p>
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</p>
<p>While opinions on AA cannot be wrong or right, some basic facts have to be. </p>
<p>The facts do not support that the majority of those who benefit from affirmative action are either (1) wealth(y) and/or (2) immigrants.</p>
<p>
So the solution is, in return, using an unfair method that is beyond an individual’s control?!
There are plenty of URMs that had a nice childhood with no experiences of disadvantage in terms of race. Likewise, there are plenty of Asians and Caucasians that have suffered in various aspects. You are assuming that all URMSs are disadvantaged and that all Asians and Whites are at an advantage, which even you know is false. I’m Asian, and throughout my childhood I was plagued with clinical depression, failing (F) grades, family crises, social impediment (almost no friends), among with a myriad of other issues. My entire family, including my mom who is the only one living with me in the US, never had any secondary school education and is entirely oblivious to the education system of the US. It wasn’t until less than 2 years ago that I became more aware of what I can do with my life (with the help of a new friend I met who is compassionate and understanding) and I am still at the short end of the affirmative action stick! I could explain a few of these issue on college apps but I would have to use the majority of the space to write about my academic interests and my current character.</p>
<p>If it weren’t for my personal experiences, I would not be so adamantly opposed to affirmative action. My race is overrepresented at college. So what? I don’t give a damn which races are in the colleges I am applying to. All of the problems that you assumed in your post could be solved by individual evaluation of background and circumstances. A black or Hispanic applicant coming from a racially divided or historically discriminatory community? Sure, give that applicant extra consideration. It is true that colleges highly value individual evaluation, but it’s also true that the vast majority of elite colleges use race as a factor and that affirmative action itself does not imply any evaluation on the individual level; therefore, it is absolutely unnecessary to use use affirmative action when just individual analysis can solve issues of inherent advantage/disadvantage more efficiently. The ultimate urge to use affirmative action stems from wanting to have an aesthetically pleasing student body (colorful!) to avoid criticism. In other words, colleges want to be politically correct and have as close to proportion of the races as possible for the simple, irrational desire to not want any one (or two) race dominating. It’s really pathetic; they are willing to resort to using racial discrimination to achieve their goals. Of course, I do not deny that achieving diversity (the only redeeming argument for affirmative action) is a concern for colleges, but racial diversity does not imply intellectual diversity, which is truly the important one. But the rest is another argument that I will not touch here.</p>
<p>I would like to add that for a time, Asians were severely disadvantages URMs just like blacks and Hispanics (remember the railroads and internment camps?). Despite social hardships, Asians’ value for education have elevated them to the most proportionally educated group in the U.S.? But since when is value for learning a bad thing? Since colleges decided that having any one group overrepresented is a bad thing, regardless of whether the group deserved it or its merits. Now affirmative action is basically saying “Now that we have an over-successful minority, we need to pull that group back down and distribute some of that group’s opportunities to less represented minorities in order to have racial equality.”</p>
<p>My response: **Since when does equality = fairness? Isn’t fairness, rather than equality, what social advocates strive for? Or is society still blind to this difference? **</p>
<p>Affirmative Action should be on the decline since such programs have been helping URMs for decades. But even if the time comes when URMs are no longer disadvantaged environmentally, AA proponents will still advocate “race conscious decision” because they look at the numbers (hypothetical situation): “Oh look! Asians are still claiming 10%+ of admission and Whites 70%! That means we still need AA to give URMs more opportunities!” The problem is that AA proponents will always advocate equality over fairness, regardless of how artificial that equality is.</p>
<p>EDIT: Wow this is a long post. This is what I get for thinking about affirmative action more than anything else nowadays.</p>
<p>Bookmarked.</p>
<p>weird the thread above this one is from an Indian kid who’s asking if being Indian hurts his chances at admission?</p>
<p>
I’m assuming that, on average, given facts of society, more people would rather be whites or Asians than Hispanics or blacks when it comes to college admissions. Yes there are dumb whites in the projects and there are black prodigies living in a penthouse in Manhattan. But this is not the typical. </p>
<p>
My view does not take into account past hardships but rather present social conditions. </p>
<p>
My thought experiment may not give equality, but it does provide fairness. If we can agree on society’s structure and political/economic system in some egalitarian hypothetical state where we know nothing about our outcomes in life (wealth, race, intelligence, health), then, as the argument goes, every outcome after that is just. I suggest reading a summary of Rawls’ Justice as Fairness for a much better hashing out of this philosophy. </p>
<p>
True, nor does it assure cultural diversity. This is why many people have a problem admitting, say, a half-hispanic person who grew up in an extremely white culture and who has little ties to his/her Hispanic heritage.</p>
<p>Anyways I hope I clarified my philosophy on how AA can be construed as just, despite seemingly contrasting with tenets of equality on the surface.</p>
<p>I am a Chinese and the thing I worry about is the whites actually perform better on everything, and that’s the reason why they got accepted more.
better ECs, better SAT scores(I only got 2050 and I have seen loads of 2200+).
They usually write better essays, so…
It’s really hard to compete in this condition.</p>
<p>
Don’t forget better looking…</p>
<p>Why do people refuse to admit that race plays a big part in admissions?</p>
<p>Just look in to any “consolidated list of admission results” in top college forums. </p>
<p>^^and no. asians have higher average SAT scores. period.</p>
<p>I wonder what is the % of Chinese in the highly ambitious, hopeful Asian applicants. Indian, Korean and others… I doubt top schools treat all Asian the same.</p>
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</p>
<p>xiggi, what “facts” are you talking about? You make an assertion but provide nothing to back it up. How about these facts?</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Of all blacks aged 18 or 19 in the U.S., roughly 13% are first- or second-generation immigrants. (Thus, around 87% are third-generation or older.) Yet, when it comes to black students in the Ivy Leagues, 40.6% are first- or second-generation. [url=<a href=“http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/02/01/black]Source[/url”>http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/02/01/black]Source[/url</a>]</p></li>
<li><p>In the United States as well, affirmative action has been a boon to those already more fortunate. A study of a random sample of minority beneficiaries of government contracts set aside by the Small Business Administration showed that more than two-thirds of these beneficiaries had net worths of more than a million dollars each. (Source, Affirmative Action Around The World: An Empirical Study, p. 120)</p></li>
<li><p>Because minority immigrants are eligible for affirmative action, even though they have obviously suffered no past discrimination in the United States, members of the Fanjul family from Cuba–with a fortune exceeding $500 million–have received government contracts set aside for minority businesses. An absolute majority of the money paid to “minority”-owned construction firms in Washington, D.C., during the period from 1986 to 1990 went to European businessmen from Portugal. Asian entrepreneurs have likewise immigrated to the United States and then acquired preferential access to government contracts. Such results once again demonstrate how far the reality of affirmative action departs from its rationale of remedying past discrimination (Source, ibid., p. 121)</p></li>
</ol>
<p>Wow! Fabrizio and ziggi in the same thread! </p>
<p>Fabrizio, while I don’t doubt your numbers, I am curious about the significance of the “n”. </p>
<p>“black students in the Ivy Leagues, 40.6% are first- or second-generation”</p>
<p>or</p>
<p>"more than two-thirds of these beneficiaries had net worths of more than a million dollars each. "…“Affirmative Action Around The World: An Empirical Study, p. 120)”…looking it up…</p>
<p>and …“members of the Fanjul family from Cuba–with a fortune exceeding $500 million–have received government contracts set aside for minority businesses. An absolute majority of the money paid to “minority”-owned construction firms in Washington, D.C., during the period from 1986 to 1990 went to European businessmen from Portugal.”</p>
<p>Deferring to your skills with the data…what role does the “n” play here? I swear I must know a good percentage of black doctors, and I don’t know ANYBODY with ANY net worth before medical school, let alone millions. I was “2nd gen”; my dad born in Alabama in 1918 went to college ( called “normal” school then, and supposedly a teacher there around age 18; not sure if that’s the same as what most mean by “college”…), but my husband was first gen. What does that make our kids?</p>
<p>More importantly for me ( and NOT in the context of college confidential), do you have any numbers with regard to the “black” N overall?</p>
<p>Also, you know this but, Georgia seems SUCH a different perspective than California. Just sayin’.</p>