<p>"Situation 1: Little Susie breaks a ceramic dish helping her mom load the dishwasher.</p>
<p>Situation 2: Little Susie breaks a ceramic dish throwing it at her mom."</p>
<p>AA is Situation 3 :Little Susie wants a particular blue plate that is in the middle of a stack of green plates. She reaches in to grab it and carelessly knocks some of the green plates above it to the floor.</p>
<p>MIT might as well be on Mars for those kids in Long Beach. How many of the Freedom Writers do you think ended up at MIT or comparable schools (as opposed to the local community college or state college?) AA at places like MIT benefits a lot of upper middle class minority kids who otherwise would attend their state U or a 2nd tier private school (say CMU instead of MIT). AA has a kind of cascade effect - those other schools now have to do their own AA to fill their quotas, using kids who are again 200-300 SAT pts. below their school avg., and so on down the line - MIT gets the kids that belong at CMU, CMU gets kids that belong at Penn State, etc. - The bottom end of the daisy chain is where the real impact on graduation rates is felt the most 'cause a lot of those kids are in over their heads. If everyone just went to the school which they were qualified for by non-AA criteria, there is a high probability that overall black graduation rates would go UP. </p>
<p>A big beneficiary group for AA has been 1st generation African-Americans - immigrant kids whose parents are from say Nigeria or the Caribbean - it's not clear to my why they are more deserving of AA than say kids whose parents are from Yemen or Vietnam.</p>
<p>I'm sure you can find the information somewhere. I recall her saying that one of her students went to Northwestern. Some (maybe half?)of them are at California State University. That's all I know.</p>