<p>Colleges know what race the applicant is usually by name and personal statement, including the UCs who claim that they don’t take race into consideration. There really is no way, imo, to remove AA entirely. </p>
<p>Besides, colleges get money and reputation by having higher diversity.</p>
<p>Uh you cannot tell my race by my name or essays.</p>
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<p>Strictly speaking, most social studies tend to point to the a positive correlation between income and intelligence. Correlation is not causation, as assuming that being poor makes you stupider is faulty logic, but he’s hardly at odds with ‘most social scientists’. I’m on your side on this one, but make sure you get the evidence straight.</p>
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<p>I think they all get more money and reputation by having graduates that excel in their fields and a good program of study, not by admitting more black/purple/blue people. I’ve never given two damns about diversity in any school I looked at; quality of courses, quality of professors, reputation of the department. All else is secondary.</p>
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<p>We agree on something. Neither of us care about diversity at our colleges. But, diversity is definitely a selling point for many colleges. Race breakdowns are listed right next to HS GPA and SAT scores.Race distribution is part of a college’s profile and I am sure they advertise their diversity to people who would care such as people with tons of money who have been known to donate to minority causes in the past).</p>
<p>“I’ve never given two damns about diversity in any school I looked at”</p>
<p>Ha. I did the complete opposite.</p>
<p>I’d prefer not to go to a school that’s 70%+ white.</p>
<p>Diversity comes in all forms not just skin color. So really it does not bother me that I am going to one of the whitest schools in the country.</p>
<p>what school is that?</p>
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<p>And for those of us who have lacked food, medicine, clothing, shelter, decent education, parental guidance and who have had families that consist of drunkards, drug users, wife beaters, criminals, and prostitutes, I’d argue we are at an academic disadvantage that is strongly linked with our family’s income lever. Many low income students do have the problems you were fortunate enough to not have to face. I bet I’d look amazing on a college application if I could include my life story. I’m guessing you’d be surprised to know that people who come from low income families with most of the problems you mention are at a serious disadvantage. For me, competing with people who had not experienced any serious hardship was mentally crushing. It’s obnoxious to come from serious hardship then be compared to *ssholes who had everything handed to them. All the valedictorians at my high school, minus me, were at least lower middle class. </p>
<p>I don’t see how different colored people adds “cultural diversity”. I can see how international students add to cultural diversity or recent immigrants, but how does having Americans with different skin colors and facial features add to cultural diversity? It seems to be more visual diversity than anything. And at that point it just seems a silly thing to do.</p>
<p>I personally don’t care about the ethnic diversity at the schools I’ve been considering transferring to. I did not even look. I could care less how many white, hispanic, black, asian, etc people there are. I don’t pick out people I hang out with based on “cultural diversity”, so why does it matter at the school? Why care about the percentage of white people surrounding you compared to the percentage of people of color? I don’t care what they look like.</p>
<p>cultural diversity is overrated. trust me, I live in canada and I’m becoming a minority. The city I live in is just divided based on race. Browns have one part of the city, blacks have one part, natives another. At least the asians somewhat spread out. Most non-european foreign languages are annoying as **** as well.</p>
<p>In all honesty, being in an upper-middle class family, it was considerably easier for me to get into a decent university than it would be had my parents been in poverty. Since there is a strong correlation between under-represented minorities and poverty, it makes sense and is fair as chances are that they are poorer and have, because of this, had a harder time in high school and grades and extra-curricular activities would suffer from that.</p>
<p>That being said, I can’t help but think that a better way to do handle it would be to base it directly off the gross income of the parents instead of indirectly and less accurately doing it through race. After all, there’s no reason Malia and Sasha Obama should be given an advantage because of their race. </p>
<p>In the end, if your parents were poor you had a harder time in school through no fault of your own. Affirmative Action is one way to address this. However, directly addressing this would be more accurate and would make it less controversial. I had advantages poorer Americans didn’t and that should be addressed. Affirmative Action is better than nothing but not the best.</p>
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In all honesty, being in an upper-middle class family, it was considerably easier for me to get into a decent university than it would be had my parents been in poverty.
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<p>In my case, I am not confident school would have been easier for me had I come from an affluent family. Trips to Europe, bigger house, nice car, expensive clothing - none of that would have made me more intelligent or motivated to excel at school. On the contrary, I think the opposite would have been true since I would have had less to prove and less of an incentive to improve myself.</p>
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<p>I am not sure what’s the image that comes to your mind when you think of poverty, but I am guessing it’s something along the lines of hunger, illness, abuse, neglect, uncertainty, deterioration of cognitive abilities and so on. That might be true in cases of abject poverty, but what about cases like mine, in which my family’s low income status never caused me any physical, mental or emotional hardship? Why should I, as a low income underrepresented minority who never suffered any hardship, be given an advantage over privileged people? Is affirmative action effectively a consolation prize because my family lacked the cash to send me on trips to Europe?</p>
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<p>I think it should be on the basis of hardships overcome, not race or parents’ income.</p>
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<p>That’s a sweeping generalization. It’s insulting, too.</p>
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<p>I am waiting to hear what advantages you had that I didn’t. If you mean access to tutors, SAT preparation courses and so on, that might or might not have been an advantage. Some people are motivated and intelligent enough to do well on their own or with whatever resources are freely available at their schools. It has little and sometimes nothing to do with their family’s income.</p>
<p>“I think it should be on the basis of hardships overcome, not race or parent’s income.”</p>
<p>Good luck coming up with a way to measure that.</p>
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You’re missing the point - it’s not about you personally. The fact is on average, rich kids have advantages poor people don’t. Maybe you didn’t grow up neglected or suffer hardship, but lots of people did. Lots of poor people have to work a lot to help support their families. Meanwhile, the rich kids I grew up with had private tutors for every subject and never needed to work. And once again, if you don’t want the advantage, just don’t put down your race…it’s not a huge deal.
Millions of people apply to college, do you think they can go through their individual life histories and check their backgrounds? Lots of people already make up “hardship stories” for essays or exaggerate.
No, AA isn’t about you at all, it’s about the fact that colleges are businesses and having URMs around campus makes them look good, makes them look more “diverse” and AA is a tool to do that. Harvard doesn’t want to be labelled as a “preppy white” school so they use AA to get more minorities. I think Amherst College and many schools have switched to socio-economic AA instead of racial AA…I guess more schools will do that now.
Malia and Sasha will probably get into whatever college they want. AA isn’t really about creating “equal opportunity”, most colleges don’t care about that. Having Obama’s girls go Princeton makes Princeton look good (assuming those girls are bright) and also attracts more applications…i agree there’s no reason their race should benefit them, but that and their social status will.</p>
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<p>Obnoxious, perhaps. But welcome to the real world; people only care about end results, not the starting point. </p>
<p>Let’s use weight, since this is a college forum full of narcissists. Hypothetically, if someone weighted 500 pounds and managed to get down to 300, that’s a major change and overcoming a lot of hardship to get there. However, they’d still be obese and the person who went from 150 to 120 would be in better health AND be considered more attractive (by most people anyways). Is it fair? No, but it is pragmatic and the way stuff works. If your boss gives you and a coworker a job to do and you get it done, but it’s mediocre, and your coworker did an excellent job, who is he supposed to reward? The coworker, obviously. Even if the reason you did worse than him was because your care got towed, your fairy godmother died, and you got locked out of your apartment.</p>
<p>Overcoming hardship could signal a great personality in an applicant, such as willingness to work hard and drive, but it does little else. Colleges are still going to admit the kid who got a perfect SAT and state honors in whatever over the kid who persevered despite poor parents and a crappy life to get a 3.0 and a decent SAT score. End results matter more in real life.</p>
<p>Alix2012 gets it, it has nothing to do with fairness. If college admissions were fair then ECs, essays, and stuff wouldn’t matter, just grades and test scores.</p>
<p>Colleges want to advertise a diverse student body for the sake of appearing diverse. It might help them attract qualified minority applicants but it’s mostly to look good and non-racist.</p>
<p>MissSilvestris and others really need to stop complaining about being born white and rich and going to a good high school.</p>
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<p>Learn to read, dude. Seriously.</p>
<p>actually what you resent is other idiots who think affirmative action shouldn’t exist.</p>
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<p>College admissions tries not to emulate the real world because the real world is hardly meritocratic. The most hardworking, well suited person doesn’t get the job. The connected person, or the charismatic person, or the attractive person gets the job. Doing the work is a small part of the actual hiring process for most jobs because most jobs only require a bare minimum level of competency that most applicants can fill. The rest is all preference and connections.</p>
<p>This isn’t to say that college admissions are completely based on merit because adcoms also have a very specific idea of what kind of class they want to build, but the process is certainly more meritocratic than the job market.</p>
<p>It’s dumb to compare the poor kid to the rich kid in college admissions. Absolutely stupid. Can you really compare poor Johnny who grew up in Appalachia to Richard that grew up in Fairfax? No. Context is important. Potential is important. College is a place where students can reach their potential. Adcoms know that and base their decisions on that very real philosophy.</p>
<p>I am against affirmative action. I feel that it is racism in itself, in that it is stereotyping underrepresented groups and generalizing that “if you are in this minority, you are probably underprivileged, so we are going to make it really easy for you to get into our college.”</p>
<p>I don’t think that is fair, each person is a person and the color of skin should have no impact on college admission whatsoever. The quality of the candidate and the likelihood of success should only matter, not someones ethnic roots.</p>
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<p>And you would know because you’re on an adcom? My advisor is on both the undergrad and grad admission committees at my school and while they do take into account socioeconomic status, they are most certainly not here to serve the populace by giving second chances. Your application isn’t a request for someone to take pity on you and let you in; it’s a statement of who you are, what you have accomplished, and what you can reasonably be expected to accomplish if they admit you to their school. If they choose to admit someone with research experience and competition awards over some inner-city kid with decent grades, that’s their prerogative. Schools want students who are most likely to excel and make them look good and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.</p>
<p>I suppose the bit that bothers me is that people are suggesting all sorts of junk, touchy-feely ideas that are unimplementable and unrealistic. Let’s say there’s a hardworking, very ambitious applicant from the Bronx who came from a poor family and he beats out very privileged, but average rich kid for a spot. I think everyone will agree that such a situation is fair, no hard feelings. But what if you have two identical applicants and the only difference is that one is poor and one isn’t. Is it fair that the major factor that tips one over the other is his parent’s income? That sounds like being penalized for something he had no control over. I realize that admissions doesn’t square-off one application against another but it’s just a hypothetical situation to show my point. I’m not against taking socioeconomic status into account but not to the huge extent that some people advocate. If you’re good, want it badly enough, and are willing to work for it, you will succeed no matter where you come from.</p>