<p>“I think what most people tend to misunderstand is that prestigious schools that practice AA do not accept horrendously less qualified candidates (i.e. someone with a 2.5 GPA and a 1400 SAT) but maybe someone with a 3.9 and a 2100 SAT. Those numbers still indicate strong academic potential which is what schools look for.”</p>
<p>Exactly what I pointed out. With high retention rates, such strong schools only accept candidates they feel will succeed. Skin color won’t get you in. It doesn’t make you a better candidate.</p>
<p>I feel as though diversity will exist in colleges with socioeconomic action because predominantly Hispanics and Blacks are in that disadvantaged position.</p>
<p>IndianOptimist - I think you make some very valid points. I would only add the following: </p>
<p>Bowen & Bok both concede that the biggest beneficiaries of AA were not kids in the housing projects (although, there is anecdotal evidence of success stories there, too) but the kids just above poverty, whose families had previously “scratched their way” into the black working-class.</p>
<p>I’m sure that children of the “highly successful” get counted in the total for statistical purposes (what Ivy League college wouldn’t want Mila and Sasha in their entering class some day!?), but they hardly constitute enough to account for every single seat in every single elite college over the past thirty years. </p>
<p>As for extending it to the Appalachian poor, the poor Vietnamese and poor Filipinos, I think you are spot on; most people of good-will would support this. The only disagreement is where to find the money? Right now, as you probably are aware, elite colleges are currently engaged in an “arms race”, similar to the AA race of a generation ago, as to who can recruit the highest percentage of international students. Right now that recruitment is being subsidized by the highly successful elite of the Philippines, Hong Kong, Singapore and other members of the Pacific Rim, (many of whom won’t even consider an American college that isn’t as well-known as Harvard, Yale or Stanford.) Should we ban internationals because they don’t represent the bottom 5% of their countries, economically-speaking?</p>
<p>^^I might add that the same can be said for the elite of Europe and South America; American colleges are not, generally speaking, recruiting the sons and daughters of Polish dock workers.</p>
<p>I must agree with this as well. If less qualified minorities are in fact taking up space at colleges like many here seem to assume then there should be an obscenely high dropout rate among minorities. The weak don’t survive at places like MIT and Harvard so if, as IndianOptimist pointed out, there is a near non-existant dropout rate then can you really say those kids were unqualified? Maybe admissions committees are smarter than we give them credit for and can see beyond numbers. </p>
<p>Think about this. What if sometime in the future, the ivies decided to disregard SAT and ACT scores and all high schools stopped ranking (which happens at a lot of the more competitive high schools). How would you know if the black kid that just got accepted was any less qualified than you? See, we (well, mostly CC lol) rely on numbers too much to determine who is “qualified”. There are many factors beyond that! I think people begin to feel a sort of sense of entitlement to top schools because of things that I think don’t even really matter i.e. SAT scores. Should the kid with the 2400 get in over the hispanic kid with a 2000 but who also started a successful non-profit business to improve his community? There are different types of intelligence and success so you can’t always rely on quantitative factors to determine who is qualified.</p>
<p>I agree that this is a bad assumption but the racial opinions held by the public are not good arguments for abolishing or sustaining affirmative action. It doesn’t matter what the public at large thinks about civil rights (ex: flag burning, black equality) because they are protected by law, not by popular opinion. </p>
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<p>As do I. But, I would not object at all to an all black/asian/white campus as long as race was not used during the admissions process in the same way that I would not mind an all black/asian/white business as long as race was not a factor in employment. I understand the financial motivations for universities to achieve diversity (more prestige) these policies are a violation of everyone’s civil rights.</p>
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<p>Of course everyone who is accepted into an elite university is capable of doing the work. Also, I do not think anyone is arguing that URMs get in with 2.5 GPAs or 1400 SATs. Even if this was true, it wouldn’t matter. The arugments over AA are not based on how much it helps but the fact that it considers race. Even if AA was only +10 points onto a URM’s SAT, I would oppose it.</p>
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<p>Life is not fair therefore racial discrimination is OK. I am glad this wasn’t our motto during the civil rights movement in the 60’s.</p>
This is one of my primary arguments against racial AA, and it happens to be a view also held by Justice Clarence Thomas. It’s really nice and dandy that elite colleges can improve the pseudo diversity in the racial makeup of their student bodies through AA, but exactly how is it helping combat prejudices again? From what I’ve seen, race-based AA does not just fail to ease racial tensions/erase prejudices, it further aggravates them. A high achieving Hispanic American or African American who attends a great institution will automatically be assumed to be a benefactor of AA and therefore have his or her achievements dismissed, when in fact he or she may be just as good or perhaps even a better student than a white or Asian counterpart.</p>
<p>I’m pretty sure a racial group having a tip in admissions in a select few prestigious college institutions is not equivalent to an oppressive society full of blatant hate, racism, and segregation. You are twisting my words by comparing apples to oranges.</p>
<p>The scale and victims of the discrimination have changed but it is still racial discrimination. I don’t see how I am twisting your words. What else exactly did you mean by:
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<p>It sounds as if you are trying to shrug off the ‘unfairness’ of AA because life is unfair. If that is the case, why even bother having rights, innocent until proven guilty, ect? Of course life isn’t fair but that shouldn’t stop us from ending racial discrimination to the best of our abilities.</p>
<p>I have never liked this argument, as it basically justifies making an already unfair life MORE unfair. Why do that? Why not try to make an unfair life LESS unfair?</p>
<p>Bowen and Bok wrote in The Shape of the River, *“The grades earned by black students at the C&B schools often reflect their struggles to succeed academically in highly competitive academic settings. The average cumulative grade point average (GPA) for the black '89 matriculants was 2.61 on a 4.0 scale–a B-minus. The average for their white clsasmates was 3.15–somewhere between a B and a B-plus. To some, this 0.52-point difference in average GPAs may seem negligible; in fact it is very large when seen in the context of the overall distribution of grades. The average rank of black matriculants was at the 23d percentile of the class, the average Hispanic student ranked in the 36th percentile, and the average white student ranked in the 53d percentile” <a href=“p.%2072”>/i</a>.</p>
<p>So yeah, the graduation rates are comparable, but the rankings are not.</p>
<p>But these “bitter rejectee[s]” you speak of probably won’t be your classmates since, well, they were rejected. Are the classmates who downplay your academic achievements likewise “bitter”? They weren’t rejected, or else they wouldn’t be your classmates.</p>
<p>And while we’re on the subject, can one oppose racial preferences without being “bitter”?</p>
<p>In defense of the “so suck it up” comment, my guess is that the poster feels the way I do about AA: The results sometimes stink, but the alternative is much worse. The way top colleges use AA does mean that some ORM applicants will be rejected in favor of some URM applicants. I am not convinced the numbers are high, but I acknowledge that they do exist. However, what is the alternative? Wealth can be hidden and is very difficult to verify (especially by those whose parents run their own businesses), so socio-economic based AA will result in inequalities as well. A system based primarily on grades and test scores alone will result in the best schools being made up mostly of white and Asian students (ala Berkeley). Personally, I think the current system, though filled with inequities, is the best alternative available to us. As an Asian student who attended a largely Asian high school, I can tell you that every high-performing Asian in my class was accepted to many great schools, without exception. We didn’t get accepted to all schools, and there were some glaring misses (Stanford rejected us all but accepted two of our URM classmates barely ranked in the top half), but we’re all heading to great schools (HYP, MIT, Cal Tech, UCLA, Berkeley, Penn, Dartmouth, Brown, Hopkins, etc.). Thus, we must “suck it up” when it comes to those inequities found in the current system because there is no better alternative.</p>
<p>To those high-performing Asians and whites applying to the class of 2015, you can mitigate the inequalities of AA by simply applying to several schools. I applied to 12 top schools and was accepted to 9 of them. Two rejected me and one put me on the waitlist. I could make an argument that my scores were high enough to get accepted into those 3 schools, and maybe AA hurt me, but ultimately it didn’t matter, since I was accepted to 9 other schools. As long as you don’t limit your applications to 2 or 3 top schools, AA isn’t likely to hurt you much.</p>
<p>Do you believe that it is not possible to have a holistic admissions system that doesn’t consider racial classification? And what is wrong with a “mostly white and Asian” student body?</p>
<p>Using this logic, there was no need for any of the Ivy Leagues to end their institutionalized anti-Semitism. As long as Jewish students diversified their applications, “[anti-Semitism wasn’t] likely to hurt [them] much.”</p>
<p>Really, racial affimative action won’t disappear until race disappears and if you look at today’s society where everyone’s always afraid of not being politically correct and afraid of being called a racist even when they are by no means one, then it’s not happenning anytime soon. As I said, I don’t really advocate this method but it is a mixed blessing as the above poster said.</p>
<p>@fabrizio I was mostly referring to the plethora of posts that I often see on here where people didn’t get in a certain college and blame it on their race. They’re not always angry posts that say blame another minority for taking their spot but sometimes they’ll say how they wish they couldve been black, Hispanic, native American, etc so they could have gotten in with this “hook” and it’s kind of insulting to read that. It’s not only on CC, but in my high school as well. </p>
<p>Of course one can oppose AA without being bitter. I will listen to the arguments of those people rather than the emotion and assumption filled arguments by those who believe AA has screwed them over by thinking some less worthy Hispanic guy took their place.</p>
<p>How can race disappear if you keep using it as a factor? The whole idea of “to get beyond race, we must take race into account” has never made any sense to me. If you keep highlighting race, you’ll never get over it.</p>
<p>Chief Justice Roberts has it right: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”</p>
<p>Well… by definition this is what affirmative action is. Being bitter is understandable as is being offended. I understand how being a minority, this line of logic would be hurtful but you must also understand it is the reality of the situation.</p>
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<p>This statement (and your story) sounds nice but doesn’t add anything to your argument. So what if affirmative action only effects the very best schools? The fact of the matter is that it does have an impact and this impact should be justified by more than a “suck it up”. If you cannot justify it, then you really shouldn’t be posting to begin with.</p>
<p>I suppose it’s possible; it’s just very hard to project sincerity and objectivity on the Internet, especially after nearly five hundred posts of which roughly ten per cent belong to just one person.</p>