<p>Given what I’ve seen in multiple affirmative action debates, it always boils down to socioeconomic status, and how race and ethnicity is tied to it.</p>
<p>The only plausible reason to continue affirmative action is to change it in favor of economics, not race.</p>
<p>Because race is no longer completely related to socioeconomic status, there can be poor whites and rich blacks…</p>
<p>I’m against affirmative action. If Adcoms really wanted to admit applicants solely based on merit that wouldn’t factor race at all into their decision making process. Obviously the situation is more complicated than that because Adcoms could potentially guess the race of applicants based off of names, location, admission essays, etc. but still, not factoring race into decision making seems much more fair than affirmative action.</p>
<p>It also belittles the achievements of minority students who truly have high merit as these minority students may question whether or not they would have been admitted without their minority status and non-minorities may question whether minority students would have gotten into the same schools without their minority status. In a way the tragic irony of the situation is that is has the potential to create feelings of resentment/racism where there shouldn’t be these feelings. </p>
<p>To the OP, affirmative action isn’t the answer for jobs. Most employers these days are “Equal Opportunity Employers” meaning that they won’t discriminate based on race, gender, disability, sexuality, etc.</p>
<p>In anything Adcoms should look more favorably on students that come from difficult backgrounds/socioeconomic statuses regardless of race.</p>
<p>Sonia Sotomayor is a perfect example of how affirmative action can be a good thing. She, herself, admits “I am the perfect affirmative action baby” in regard to her belief that her admission test scores were not comparable to those of her classmates. However, she graduated Princeton summa cum laude, went to Yale Law, and became a Supreme Court Judge! She obviously is quite a talented person and this may not have been apparent in her Princeton application.</p>
<p>Colboy, I could just as easily come up with an example of affirmative action helping a minority get into Princeton, and then that student fails out of college. One example adds nothing to the debate.</p>
<p>Some of you are being naive, thinking colleges care about being “fair” or “equal opportunity”. There is a reason AA is based on race, not income, at most colleges.</p>
<p>Minorities receive lower SAT/ACT scores on average compared to Whites/Asians, regardless of income. Income is not what accounts for the disparity, since low income Asians do better than high income Black students. Colleges realize this and make AA based on race. You can argue it’s unfair, but there’s a legit reason behind it and I understand that. Before you get worked up, realize that this system won’t last for long as more Black/Latino students choose to go to college. </p>
<p>These are old, but prove why AA is based on race, not income: [File:1995-SAT-Education2.png</a> - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1995-SAT-Education2.png]File:1995-SAT-Education2.png”>File:1995-SAT-Education2.png - Wikipedia) and [File:1995-SAT-Income2.png</a> - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1995-SAT-Income2.png]File:1995-SAT-Income2.png”>File:1995-SAT-Income2.png - Wikipedia) and [National</a> Statistics on Education and Equity Issues, By Race and Ethnicity](<a href=“http://www.maec.org/natstats.html#sat]National”>http://www.maec.org/natstats.html#sat)</p>
<p>Similarly, women have it slightly easier getting into Engineering and men are in high demand in Nursing/Education.</p>
<p>hehe at Indiana University this past year, the school got something like a $5,000,000 donation on the condition that they give it out as scholarships to minorities. They accepted this money and created the scholarships. Two months later somebody heard about this and donated $500,000 on the condition they give it out as scholarships to white people. They wouldn’t accept this money.</p>
<p>I’m just saying.</p>
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<p>I don’t really want to get too far into this, but I will say that after learning about the admissions process through others’ anecdotes and actually being involved in it, academic merit does plays a role in the admissions game, but ultimately there are so many other reasons having nothing to do with merit that get people into college. Their parents’ wealth, legacies, athletics, and other “hooks” which happen more frequently than AA, help a great deal in these decisions. So if ethnicity were no longer included into admissions decisions, neither should these other hooks. But that obviously won’t happen, so…</p>
<p>This is the thread that never ends. Yes it goes on and on my friends.</p>
<p>I know, I am getting annoyed. Do people realize they are repeating what was said on the first four pages of this tl;dr thread? :D</p>
<p>Yes I do know this because we subscribe to Naviance. It will show you all of the scores of every student admitted to a college (without their names of course) but he was the only one admitted so it is him. How about you get the facts before making comments. How about we remove the race checkbox, that way blacks dont get an advantage over whites or vice a versa.</p>
<p>If you’re annoyed then don’t read the threat. If people want to debate about this then let them. Maybe they don’t mind; it’s fun for them to debate. If you don’t like it, no one is forcing you to read or comment.</p>
<p>So the way you see it, harvard should be full of 2.0 students because they arent coming from wealthy backgrounds? What will they magically be better students? How about the fact that there actually are poor people who achieve things in life and dont complain.</p>
<p>“Minorities receive lower SAT/ACT scores on average compared to Whites/Asians, regardless of income. Income is not what accounts for the disparity, since low income Asians do better than high income Black students.”</p>
<p>ok everybody listen up. I may have found the craziest comment in all of CC</p>
<p>^ Crazy comment? I provided links to websites that report SAT/ACT scores in regard to race and income. At least I have a reason as to why I support Affirmative Action - everyone else is pulling stuff out of their ass and crying about how unfair it is.</p>
<p>I mean, if you can find statistics that show what I said is no longer true as of 2009, that would be awesome, but otherwise I’m gonna assume the studies I’ve found are true.</p>
<p>And yes, I realize one is from 2002 and the others are from 1995.
This is from 2009:<a href=“http://www.jbhe.com/news_views/56_income-based_action.html[/url]”>http://www.jbhe.com/news_views/56_income-based_action.html</a>
Another one (which is ironically from some anti-AA book which I have a feeling is borderline racist) but proves my point:<a href=“The Retreat from Race: Asian-American Admissions and Racial Politics - Dana Y. Takagi - Google Books”>The Retreat from Race: Asian-American Admissions and Racial Politics - Dana Y. Takagi - Google Books;
<p>Anyway, I know lots of people are anti-AA but I personally support it…hopefully we won’t need it in a few decades though.</p>
<p>That is based on the 1995 SAT… WOW… we dont even use the same SAT anymore. Plus the information is from WIKIPEDIA which is unreliable. That information is shoddy at best.</p>
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[QUOTE=Begoner]
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<p>Yes, less should be expected of you, and rightly so – if you start on the bottom of the ladder, you must expend more energy to get to the top.
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<p>I’d grant you that’s a great analogy if it weren’t because I am not sure what ladder you are referring to. Ladders aside, I’m guessing that you’ll be surprised to learn that even though I come from a low income family, I’ve never lacked food, medicine, clothing, shelter or a decent education. I think you’ll also be surprised to learn that nobody in my family is a drunkard, a drug user, a wife beater, a criminal or a prostitute. It is true that I didn’t spend my summers travelling through Europe, but that never put me at a competitive academic disadvantage with my peers.</p>
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<p>Unless you are claiming that my having low income parents implies that my intelligence level is lower than that of students with rich parents (and I think you’ll be at odds with most social scientists if you are), I still don’t know on the bottom of what ladder you think I started.</p>
<p>If you were never ever disadvantaged then why do you need AA?</p>
<p>Do I need AA?</p>
<p>So just because blacks tend to score lower on the SAT we should automatically admit more? That’s like suggesting we need to admit more people with averages of 50 and below, simply because their grades are so low. The data itself proves nothing besides what is. If you want to show that the SAT is biased, that’s great, but unfortunately you haven’t really done that. All you’ve shown is that blacks score low, not the reason for it.</p>
<p>Personally, I approve of the socio-economic AA idea, but you know it’s never going to happen (at least not in the next few years) because of the cold necessity of finances. Yes, colleges do try to help lower-income students, but if it were to be a perfectly level playing field in socio-economic terms, colleges /might/ have so many qualified low-income applicants that if they took them all (or a proportional amount to the level of qualified full-paying applicants) they would probably have a fair deal of difficulty covering all their expenses. I highly doubt any college would be able to sustain a student body that was 95% aid students for more than 10 years (unless average aid package was, like, 1k or something…).</p>
<p>Another thing - if we really want to solve the problems that AA works to solve, I don’t think AA is the answer. We have to start earlier: improve the school systems so that rich kids (white OR black) in the suburbs don’t automatically get a leg up over the poor kids in the city or country simply because rich kid’s parents could afford to buy a house in the right zip code. We need to develop strong mentoring programs and communities (and improve upon those that already exist) so that from the beginning children have a strong support system no matter what their backgrounds. I’m not sure quite how to do this, but honestly it’s better to brainstorm about that than continue in an AA debate that’s probably been beat to death and will get us next to nowhere.</p>
<p>@ Legal-immi - you’re taking this way too personally…It’s not about you, it’s about the fact that Blacks/Hispanics are underrepresented in most colleges and colleges want more minorities strolling around campus; AA is just another way to get that. Women benefit from AA in Engineering admissions - does that mean women are dumber than men? Nope, just underrepresented in that field, so they get a slight boost. The fact is low-income people have less opportunities than wealthy kids who can afford personal tutors and don’t need to work in their spare time…no one’s saying being rich makes you smarter or whatever. </p>
<p>And if you don’t want to benefit from AA, just leave your race off the application, no big deal. Unless you have an obviously ethnic name, they won’t know.</p>
<p>@ Politica18: No, you missed my point…people keep asking why colleges don’t admit based on economic status, and that’s all I’m trying to explain - because culture plays an influence as much influence as income (African and Asian immigrants are often low income but do extremely well since their cultures value education more). Plus colleges simply want more minorities on campus, they don’t want a 98% white student body…so they use AA for a slight boost. It’s not even a big factor anyhow. And no, it’s not fair, but I get why it exists…and you’re right, finances make a huge difference because they can’t afford to cover all those low-income students.</p>
![http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1995-SAT-Education2.png]File:1995-SAT-Education2.png](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1995-SAT-Education2.png%5DFile:1995-SAT-Education2.png){kind=link}
![http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1995-SAT-Income2.png]File:1995-SAT-Income2.png](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1995-SAT-Income2.png%5DFile:1995-SAT-Income2.png){kind=link}
