<p>hello everyone i am new to this forum but i have some things id like to clear up</p>
<p>for the record, i am not “butt hurt” or “biased” because i got into all the schools i think i deserved to get into. some people at my school though i feel got the short end of the stick</p>
<p>this person at my school with a 1950 sat and good grades (all A’s and like 2-3 b’s so like 4.4 weighted) got into UPenn, ucla, usc and ucb . no sports, good extracurriculars. this person is black</p>
<p>however i know many people (asian/indian) at my school with over 2000 sat and similar grades (i.e. 4.2-4.5 - its easy to get high gpa at my school kinda) that didnt even get into ucsd and uci </p>
<p>i know about 3-4 friends who got over 2000 on sat that have to go to UC riverside because they didnt get in anywhere else</p>
<p>what am trying to get at is, is race really that important to colleges???</p>
<p>(also i dont want to hear BS like “oh what if the black persons essays were good” - i want legit non liberal discussion please)</p>
<p>Yes, race is important in elite college admissions. Being an URM (in the college context) can be a hook. This is no secret or mystery.</p>
<p>There is much discussion about whether collegiate Affirmative Action policies actually benefit the people they’re supposed to, and whether the concept of racial diversity should be amended in favor of greater attention to socioeconomic diversity.</p>
<p>I see this thread is getting to be quite long, and there have been some new developments that call for updating the FAQ posts way back at the beginning of the thread, so stay tuned for the next iteration of FAQ and discussion thread after I finish revising the FAQ posts off-line. </p>
<p>Good luck to everyone applying for admission next year.</p>
<p>I think that I got a warning last time I posted an affirmative action thread, so I am posting this question here, hope it gets a response, anyway I have been wondering and thinking about this for a while now, why is it that people who are against AA say thinks like “I don’t think that undeserving people should be granted admission to top schools” or “I don’t want to be treated by an AA physician” but don’t see that for example a black kid who didn’t quite have the stats to get into say Harvard, but got in because of his AA boost, could have gotten in a really good state university while being in the high percentiles without AA? Do these people respect a physician from an Ivy league school more than a physician from a state school or what?</p>
<p>I know that this is probably hard to understand because of the way I worded it, but if you aren’t sure of what I meant to say with this just tell me and I’ll try to word it better.</p>
<p>It’s only important at selective universities. Most universities in the U.S. are nonselective and admit based on GPA and SAT.</p>
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<p>I don’t think the so-called “underrepresented minority” students at elites are “undeserving.” My position has always been that if they are as deserving as their defenders paint them to be, then they would be admitted without racial preferences. Moreover, I have always maintained that it doesn’t make sense for whites and Asians to be expected to do well wherever they go while “underrepresented minorities” must attend elites, or else!</p>
<p>“I don’t think the so-called “underrepresented minority” students at elites are “undeserving.” My position has always been that if they are as deserving as their defenders paint them to be, then they would be admitted without racial preferences. Moreover, I have always maintained that it doesn’t make sense for whites and Asians to be expected to do well wherever they go while “underrepresented minorities” must attend elites, or else!”</p>
<p>But who gets to say who deserves something more than someone else? the valedictorian with perfect stats, high income, highly educated white/Asian family, private tutors, etc. or the poorly ranked Hispanic/black kid who got relatively good scores studying all by himself? They still need the boost of AA, now let me say that AA is not perfect, I think it should be based more on income, status, assets, etc. but if it was, Would it really make a lot of difference? most Hipanics/blacks/NAs are poor, How many high income blacks do you know? and even these high income URMs still have to face a racist society out there.</p>
<p>Also you say that Asians and whites are expected more from, but why wouldn’t they? given that MOST have had more privileges than MOST of their URM peers, and the reason most URMs want to attend elites is that these tend to meet full need.</p>
<p>I don’t see the relevance of your question given that I do not believe that the “URM” students at elites are “undeserving.”</p>
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<p>But those students are by and large NOT the ones who end up at elites! It’s no secret that most of the "URM"s at elites come from families that are at least middle class. Duke is one of the few top ranked universities to have income data by racial classification for one cohort. Hispanic students in the incoming class of 2002, if I recall correctly, on average actually came from families that had HIGHER incomes than their Asian peers. While black students came from families that on average that the lowest incomes, the average figure was still in the six digits.</p>
Exactly. Anytime somebody argues “well blacks and hispanics are more poor in general”, then the solution should be to make AA based on socioeconomic factors, not on race.</p>
<p>I completely disagree! First of all, minorities are much more likely to be socioeconomically disadvantaged. When you are poor, you do not have the same opportunities for academic success as the middle class kid sitting next to you that has a tutor and educated parents to help them get straight A’s. But when you are a minority, you are automatically at an even graver disadvantage. Years of oppression lead to a survivalist mentality, not one geared toward success. Also, campuses need more diversity: for example, look at UCLA’s figures:<a href=“http://www.aim.ucla.edu/admissions/admissions_ethnicity_FR.asp[/url]”>http://www.aim.ucla.edu/admissions/admissions_ethnicity_FR.asp</a> Instead of complaining that an “underqualified URM” took a “more qualified ORM’s” spot, accept the fact that the person was not meant to get in and no one really TAKES anothers seat, move on!</p>
<p>Racial classification is a very imperfect proxy for socioeconomic status. As tokenadult asked, why use racial classification if there are better (i.e. more direct) proxies for socioeconomic status? Second, as I said earlier, at least for one year at Duke, Hispanic students came from families with higher incomes on average than Asian students. Black students’ families still earned six digit incomes on average.</p>
<p>I went to a public high school where half the school was black my senior year and about a third of the school qualified for free or reduced lunch. My classmates are the ones politicians trumpet as the intended beneficiaries of racial preferences, but who really benefits? The children of professionals and frequently the children of immigrant professionals.</p>
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<p>And yet blacks did a remarkable job of improving their livelihoods between 1940 and 1960 in spite of horrendous institutionalized discrimination and racism; as Tom Sowell noted in his book, Affirmative Action Around The World, the poverty rate among blacks was 87% in 1940 but 47% by 1960. By 1970, it dropped to 30%. All of this was done before the advent of racial preferences.</p>
<p>Since then, the rate has barely dropped. I can of course not attribute the small drop to the onset of racial preferences; for all I know, it may just be diminishing marginal returns. But I can certainly say that racial preferences hasn’t done much, if anything, to reduce the poverty rate.</p>
I completely agree with this. So by that rationale, base AA off of socioeconomic factors.</p>
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Also, Asians and Jews were discriminated against and oppressed for years. They succeeded. So can latinos and blacks.
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News flash: California bans affirmative action in state college admissions. So way to choose a school that does not take racial factors into admission.</p>
<p>And now, finally, we get to the nitty gritty. When I am finally able to get back to this thread this is the one that greets me. Wow. </p>
<p>I think the difference in the “oppression” of black people is that they were taken completely from their place of origin and stripped of their culture, language, history, education, and heritage for over 400 years, not to mention another 60 - 70 years of jim crow and institutionalized racism during modern history. During slavery, black people were not allowed to read, write, or communicate in their own language. Nor were they allowed to pass on in written form the benefit of the history and origins of the land they were taken from. I’ve noticed in this country caucasian Americans in particular take pride in being able to say my family is from XYZ European country. That source of pride in generational heritage was denied any person of color enslaved at that time. No other people enslaved or “oppressed” including Jews or Asians have been asked to make such a sacrafice. None.
I don’t think it is right to make the flippant remark you did without understanding how utterly offensive it is.</p>
<p>I have read many of Thomas Sowell’s books. His conclusions are highly controversial for various reasons and extremely anti-affirmitive action(not that I would expect you to use a pro-AA author, but I thought it was important to let his bias be known)… But I do not think even he would say that racial preferences alone halted the steady decline of poverty in the black community.</p>
Alrighty there. Chill. I never said that the struggles Jews or Asians faced were on the same level as the struggles blacks placed. </p>
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That was your original post. The first part of your post was certainly legitimate, but to say that I made a flippant and offensive remark is way off target. The last time I checked, Jews and Asians are both minorities in the US, and you did not specify that you were talking about blacks. I was merely providing examples of minorities who do succeed despite past disadvantages. You also need to explain why latinos receive benefits from Affirmative Action then. I think for the most part they are able to say they are from XYZ central/south american country. Your argument falls apart when you focus on just one ethnicity.</p>
<p>Anyways, based on your current argument for affirmative action, shouldn’t gays benefit too then?</p>
<p>If Sowell is biased, would you say that Bowen and Bok are biased in the opposite direction?</p>
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<p>He did not say that. But why was the steady decline halted after 1970?</p>
<p>You talk about the deliberate and systematic attempts to deprive blacks of education when slavery was legal. In 1940, it had not yet been four score and seven years since the Civil War ended. Given that the last Civil War veteran on the Union side died in 1956, it is possible that some blacks alive in 1940 were not born free; some still had memories of that time period. And yet, as I said, IN SPITE OF horrific institutionalized discrimination, blacks on their own reduced their poverty rate by fifty-seven percentage points (87 to 30) in three decades. They did that without any racial preferences.</p>
<p>If you listen to the defenders of racial preferences, what they did during those thirty years should have been impossible. So how could they have done that?</p>
<p>Fabrizio, he has a bias. He does. I’ve read his books and anyone who has read them knows this. Its not anything against him. He is an amazing author and scholar, but he has a bias. Period. Yes, Bowen and Bok, have a bias as well. Anyone who has read their studies knows this as well. </p>
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<p>I don’t listen to defenders of racial preferences at all, as I don’t believe in any preferences in college admissions. But with that said, the timeframe you reference was a time when black people regardless of economic, social, or academic status would have all lived in the same neighborhood by necessity. You were not allowed to live anywhere else. Why is this important to note when we talk about poverty decline and economics? Well, that means, black money would have remained in the neighborhood of origin and would have been recycled in same said neighborhood several times before leaving. The poverty stagnation you mention was right around the time of integration where affluent members of the black community could now live and shop in places that were not available before. Black money was now spread throughout the national ethos and did not only remain local. This along with many other historical factors unique to that time leant itself to increased poverty levels. Such as once thriving black neighborhoods being left for the poorest of the community. These poor communities would now have a weak tax base and an impoverished minority majority which lead to poorly funded schools for that area, which leads us to this conversation. How did they do it? They kept their money in the community they lived, really almost exclusively because they were separated economically and educationally from American society.</p>