<p>Yes I remember what I just posted earlier
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<p>Your second paragraph does nothing to refute my argument. AA does not work off the idea that their are not enough URMs applying to top schools, or else it would only actively recruit URMs, not give them advantages.</p>
<p>My rudeness? Your arguments are illogical and you claim my statement is unreasonable, my response carries that same tone as yours.</p>
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<p>Basically, but the schools need to make money in order to provide services for their students, and this (encouraging more and more applications) is one way to gain some of that money.</p>
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<p>How on earth would admitting students alongside students of other races harm their university experience? </p>
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<p>I personally know three students at Stanford who have commented that they have appreciated the racial and cultural diversity there and that it has benefited their experiences there.</p>
<p>^ Congratulations, you have provided three examples of anecdotal evidence.</p>
<p>And you still havn’t shown me how AA does not imply that URM’s are intrinsically inferior.</p>
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<p>I should have elaborated further. By encouraging more minorities to apply to top schools, schools are inherently going to accept a higher proportion of those students.</p>
<p>I never claimed your arguments were illogical and unreasonable, I said that the rudeness present in your post (“Wow that might be the single dumbest argument I’ve ever heard.” "Your irrational defense of AA is what is truly ‘completely unreasonable’.)</p>
<p>^ I’m not talking about acceptance rates, I’m talking about the fact that URMs consistently gain admission with lower objective stats. </p>
<p>Aren’t you frustrated when a URM is accepted into a prestigious university and you hear everyone around him say “He was only accepted because of affirmative action”? Affirmative action has caused society to hold URM students to a double standard, encouraging the automatic assumption that preferential treatment had to have been given in order for said students to be admitted. As SC Justice Clarence Thomas argues, the incredible achievements of URM students are eclipsed and rendered unimportant by affirmative action.</p>
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<p>Once again, there’s no need to be rude like this.</p>
<p>I’ve seen data on one of these AA debate threads that said that proportionally, URMs aren’t as likely as Asians to reach for top, top schools. This may be due to a variety of factors, but none of the factors involve inherent racial inferiority. One factor may be the fact that many URMs are living in poverty (American Indian reservations, for example, are very poor).</p>
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<p>It doesn’t really bother me. It used to, but then I realized that any student at a top school is an outstanding student. Admissions is a crapshoot, and colleges pick people they know will benefit the college (either through fame, e.g. Emma Watson, or by simply being diverse and being in a picture on brochures). Whether this is ethical or not, I don’t want to argue. I’ve just been making the case for colleges.</p>
<p>^ Waiting for your response to my last post, but I’ll address your post anyway. It wouldn’t surprise me that URMs aren’t as likely as Asians to reach for top, top schools due to the driven culture of Asian families to make sure their kids focus on academics. I’m not saying that the small number of URM applicants to top schools promotes the idea that URMs are racially inferior, it is the “admissions boost (handicap)” that they are given which implies their inherent racial inferiority.</p>
<p>I see where you’re coming from, but by admitting URMs who may be inferior to Asian applicants colleges are encouraging more URMs to apply, as well as non-URMs who like the idea of racially diverse colleges. Some people choose to see the “handicap” as a negative thing, but I choose to see it as a positive.</p>
<p>The positive aspect of AA is that it provides URM’s with opportunities they might not otherwise be able to receive. However, the original intent of AA when it was first established under LBJ was to mitigate the discrimination toward URMs, which as I have already explained, it obviously fails to do.</p>
<p>I see I made a mistake in my thoughts: I meant to write, “…and increasing selectivity.”</p>
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<p>Rothman et al. did not offer any explanations for why their results were what they were.</p>
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<p>Three out of [url=<a href=“Stanford.EDU Name Assignment Policy | University Communications”>http://ucomm.stanford.edu/cds/cds_2009.html]18,500[/url</a>] students? Besides, Stanford is just one school. Rothman et al.'s sample “included a total of 140 universities and colleges, stratified by institution type according to the Carnegie classifications of Doctoral, Comprehensive, and Liberal Arts schools.”</p>
<p>Yes, it fails to complete the original purpose. Colleges have twisted it to increase apps and “diversity” at their schools, despite the fact that many URMs self-segregate (which I really detest). I support AA mostly because I have seen firsthand the positive effects that one URM’s acceptance to a top school had on her younger, poor URM peers. Several of them are on track to go to some of the top schools in the nation while just years ago, in junior high, they seemed to be going nowhere.</p>
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<p>The entire sample size for me was four, so my “results” might be a little skewed, but the point remains that at least some students benefit from racial and cultural diversity.</p>
<p>Yes their are many isolated examples of the positive effects of AA on URMs, but the overall effect of AA has been to further entrench the notion of inferiority of URMs in our society. I don’t want AA removed because it is unfair, I want it removed because it strengthens the very institutions that it aims to destroy.</p>
<p>I suppose this is true, as a great many people have very negative perceptions of AA. There have been incidents in numerous results threads for Ivies where a rejected student will try to debase an accepted URM’s achievements rather than recognize the URM’s accomplishments, and this is where society’s distaste for what is deemed an “unfair advantage” in an already unfair system truly shines. I can see how a boost for URMs could be deemed as especially harmful in cases where there is a set-in-stone method for something, but in the case of college admissions, admissions to top schools is already so arbitrary that it’s hard to judge exactly what earned a student entrance into a school. Many people believe they were rejected only because they were not URMs, but how could they possibly know? There are so many factors that go into college admissions that there must have been something else that was not spectacular about their application. This is why there is no need for society to have such a negative opinion of AA.</p>
<p>^ Exactly my point. Affirmative Action based entirely off of socioeconomic background would be much more effective in furthering racial equality while still providing needed opportunities for the indigent who may otherwise not have such opportunities available.</p>
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<p>But is that the appropriate standard? So long as at least one student benefits from “racial and cultural diversity,” affirmative action shall be considered a good thing? Your argument would be a lot stronger if you could show that most students benefit from “racial and cultural diversity.” As stated, Rothman et al.'s results do not support that. Of course, Rothman et al. is far from be-all-end-all, but their critique of prior studies is pretty convincing to me, especially their argument that prior studies suffered from poor survey question wording, which skewed the results in favor of “diversity is good.”</p>
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<p>Did this URM get in because she was an URM?
She could’ve been accepted on the strength of her excellence alone, so if you’re suggesting that these younger, poor URM peers refer to her as as an exemplary model who has done great, then I suppose that works.</p>
<p>However, if the only attribute that these younger URM’s see in her besides her race is her excellence, then many other White and Asian students who have done well can also serve as models.</p>
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<p>Because they are now aware of AA? They are now on track because they know AA is there to help them? How does that make sense?</p>
<p>I think fabrizio has already beaten this horse dead but to bring up a point that I’m sure someone else has brought up previously:</p>
<p>One of the biggest reasons why URMs themselves support AA is because they directly benefit from it. As apologists, they will find reasons to keep it around but will never mention that specific one.</p>
<p>A few weeks ago, I asked Shrinkrap if she would support AA even if it meant it came at her own race’s detriment.</p>
<p>She has yet to answer.</p>
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<p>Agreed.</p>
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<p>I’m going to hop back into my college-defense mode and say that a racially diverse campus will draw more apps. Plus, colleges aren’t exactly the most humanitarian places in the world; many just need to make a profit, and socioeconomic AA would just strain their financial resources even further.</p>
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<p>I am not quite sure how to approach the Rothman survey in this discussion, as it is unknown why certain students believe their educational experience was harmed by racial diversity. That makes little sense.</p>
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<p>So what if, to protect themselves against that strain, colleges suddenly decided to only apply AA to URMs who are well off?</p>
<p>Doesn’t that defeat the already flawed “many URM’s come from poor socioeconomic backgrounds” argument?</p>
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<p>Her acceptance was a while back, and I never knew her personally, but what I know is that she was as outstanding an applicant as any other, even more so considering she did not have even near the economic resources many equal applicants had.</p>
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<p>No, they’re excelling because they’ve seen that people can actually go on to great things (or at least to great colleges) from their situation, and they’ve realized that they don’t want to be in the same conditions they’ve always been in in 20 years, and while an education from a top college won’t guarantee that, it will certainly help them.</p>
<p>People seem to bring this up every time I point out anything in here. But yes, I would still support AA, because it is benefiting both URMs and the top colleges. There’s no reason not to.</p>
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<p>No, it doesn’t. The colleges are benefiting from the URMs who are applying (and being accepted), and that’s one argument for AA.</p>