<p>First, holistic admissions are done in many, many schools around the country. It isn’t that controversial in and of itself.</p>
<p>UCal is a public university. That means that it should be working in concert in some way with the public education system. If public schools in Cali deviate greatly in quality, I can see making a case that people who attend those disadvantaged schools should be given a bit of a break, because they were already treated unjustly by the public system. Not much of a break, but some slight consideration. Perhaps that should be an incentive for the government to assure quality primary education for all its citizens–and it seems to me that in a very wealthy state that is ranked, what, 40th for elementary/high school education, something injust is going on in this regard. It is entirely possible that the children who went to these bad schools might have developed other qualities and survival skills that students in more privileged schools did not. Not necessarily–but let them at least make a case for themselves in the holistic system.</p>
<p>Ok AA can definitely benefit minorities…but the thing is…when you are benefiting someone, you must also hurt someone else…and in this case, Asians are disadvantages.
So the underlying problem is, is it right to take away from the Asians to give to the minorities??</p>
<p>^ they are not taking anything away; they are just changing the game. I bet what will happen in 4 years is that asians will no longer spend all their time studying for the SATs and getting high GPAs and will start doing other things to game the UC admissions system because they are tenacious. The whole projection thing assumes nothing changes in the next 4 year except the UC’s policies. Pretty soon you will start seeing Asian quarterbacks and track stars n stuff because their parents will realized to get into UCB, you dont need a 1600 SAT but you do need some other things.</p>
<p>Asian Americans *are *a minority. And when they say Asian American, they’re referring to people of chinese, japanese, laotian, vietnamese, filipino, Indian, Pakistani and so on and so forth…descent. As a diverse group of minorities lumped together, I see no huge reason why this sort of AA will benefit many at all. Of course, the article was vague in how exactly the admissions policy would suceed in targetting Asian Americans, but the article does do a good job in riling people’s emotions. College Admissions never was a fair game, and never will be a fair game, so I really don’t think this article can make too much of a difference for many people. Whether or not the Asian American community is hit hard by new UC admissions policies is something we’ll all have to wait and see.</p>
<p>I think this is actually a good idea (I’m Indian too I guess if that means anything). SAT II scores are probably some of the worst tools to use in the college admissions process.</p>