<p>Here on CC, the general consensus is that affirmative action should be based on socioeconomic diversity rather than race. This article from TIME, however, says that would be a bad idea.</p>
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Because racial affirmative action is such a raw sore on our body politic, some advocate a modification: affirmative action by social class. If you were raised barefoot and poor, you move up the line, past children of the rich and the upper middle class, no matter what your race or theirs. The idea is tempting. It would take race out of the picture. It would eliminate the galling (though still rare) sight of blacks from privileged backgrounds marching into Princeton past the crumpled bodies of working-class whites with higher sat scores. And it would be truer to the principle of equal opportunity. It would be fairer. Barack Obama has half endorsed the idea, saying his own privileged daughters don't deserve the benefits of affirmative action. John McCain's views have been too contradictory to know for certain, but he also could be interpreted as being favorably inclined to something like this.</p>
<p>It's a terrible idea. It would do nothing about the principal complaint people have about affirmative action: that it violates the principle of merit. People with better qualifications would still lose jobs and university slots to people with worse qualifications, and their resentment probably wouldn't be mollified by the fact that the beneficiaries of this policy might be white. Moreover, it would put America in the business of labeling people and rewarding them according to a criterion--social class--which would be a nightmare possibly even worse than race.
<p>Quoting from the article, affirmative action “violates the principle of merit.” While it gives its beneficiaries a boost, it forces the concession that generally, they are weak, needing help because they can’t make it on their own. Affirmative action should not exist, period.</p>
<p>anyone who thinks that a system that elevates rich kid A, who had every imaginable advantage handed to him, over poor kid B, who had to work twice as hard for similar results, is based on merit seriously doesn’t know their butt from their elbow.</p>
<p>Consider employment. You’re the employer of a company that makes an object, any random object. Rich person A, who has had every luxury handed to him over his life and has never faced any hardship, makes 100 objects per hour, while person B, who toils in agony each day, makes 90. Considering the bottom line, would you still pick person B?</p>
<p>The lack of affirmative action doesn’t “[elevate] rich kid A.” In fact, it elevates no one. The existence of it, on the other hand, does elevate a subgroup, but at the expense of others.</p>
<p>Education opens up the avenue to more education, or the ability to fund other people’s education, so naturally you also look for the student who has the most promising marginal benefit per marginal cost ratio. And note, after a point, nearly all the applicants are “qualified” – the school begins to look for students who will contribute something special to the school. </p>
<p>So let the school choose the students who they think will have the most impact. Lower-income students who are given a chance to succeed will gain the ability to not only improve themselves but their community in the future, whereas students whose families who already “have it made” don’t have quite the same potential to generate the same impact on their community per dollar spent. This goes beyond mere academics or even winning state tourneys.</p>
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<p>Well, it’s the principle behind welfare (or workfare) in general: give someone a leg up out of the quicksand so that later they will be able to stand on their own two feet and help others out.</p>
<p>This is where your analogy fails. Education is not employment … it is investment. You could put your money in an already well-to-do blue chip stock but it’s not going to generate a big return on investment – however, if you find the right company that has great potential if only given a bit more capital, then you have found a company that will generate great returns on the dollar. </p>
<p>So which stock do you choose? After all, the “rich stock” supposedly has “more merit”, so OBVIOUSLY you pour all your money into the blue chips, right? After all, they tend to have the higher incomes.</p>
<p>There shouldn’t be any affirmative action, period. Nothing for college, workforce (civil service jobs come to mind), athletics, nothing. Need-blind college admissions would be a plus, as numerous colleges have moved to. This allows them to consider the student and their qualifications…nothing more, nothing less. I also think it’s a shame that a college will let a kid in who doesn’t deserve to be there because daddy writes a big check. Unfortunately we don’t live in an ideal world.</p>
<p>So you think that the OVERWHELMING disparites in blacks and whites have everything to do with merit and nothing to do with the HUNDREDS of years of denied opportunity. It’s so easy to dismiss AA when whites and others greatly benfit from the long standing policies that gives, yes that gives whites the foundation on which they can perpetuate the idea of a true meritocracy. It only confirms the woefully inadequate knowledge of how this country was established and the backs on which this country was built on.</p>
<p>AA for social class I think is a good idea, despite what the article says.
Rich kids can afford expensive test prep, can hire college consultants, and in the case of the extremely rich, can have their parents donate a lot of money to a prospective college in order to tip the scale in their child’s favor.
Poor kids don’t have any of these advantages. They have to do everything on their own. </p>
<p>Which would you pick. A rich kid who scored a 2350 on his SAT, but had countless hours of test prep from professionals, or the poor kid who got a 2230 without any fancy benefits? </p>
<p>AA for social class doesn’t help one group of people at the expense of others, rather, it equals the playing field as to give all applicants the same footing. </p>
<p>AA for race, however, doesn’t do this. As it stands now, a rich black kid can get into a college with more ease than a poor white kid, simply because he’s black, even though his skin color has not had any noticeable lasting negative impact on his life that his money couldn’t fix. </p>
<p>Social class AA is completely legitimate, and this is coming from someone who’s middle class and probably wouldn’t be helped by it.</p>
<p>This is sick. What if Creepy Person C made 120 objects a day by cheating? Considering the bottom line, would you still pick him? Education is not about “the bottom line”. Education is not a mindlessly capitalist institution.</p>
<p>It elevates a subgroup that needs elevating.
Or do you disagree, and think poor people are poor because they’re lazy and that they deserve it?</p>
<p>We will never be able to move beyond where we are right now unless we stop having preferential treatement for any class, gender, race, etc… I didn’t say it was realistic to do away with affirmative action but I do think programs like it hurt. I don’t believe they help the long-term situation.</p>
<p>pmrlcomm, you and I live in the same city IIRC. One that is 43% Black. A city that is over 200 years old, yet of the top 100 businesses in our city, how many Black CEO’s? How many AA law firms? Name the top AA owned business.The community with the wealthiest concentration of AA? The school with the highest concentration of AA performers? Should be relatively easy with such a significant portion of Blacks. But it isn’t is it? It’s far easier to do so with the white populace. When discussing race with my white co workers, I simply ask them to pick up the yellow pages and demonstrate to me the econmic clout blacks possess, and to explain to me why it it isn’t so. Of the few that take on the challenge, none of their rebuttals hold up to critical scrutiny.</p>
<p>It is so easy to dismiss AA policies when one is woefully ignorant of the historical legacy of policies that have created and continue the very platform in which whites benefit. Denied opportunities in education, housing, employment, business, land ownership, and just basic human decency for HUNDREDS of years. And yet we continually bellyache about the relative crumbs that are dispersed to people of color. How sad. You could take Bill Gates and the founder of Oracle, 2 billionaires out of several hundred in this country, and they possess more wealth than all the Blacks, 40 million plus and counting COMBINED. Only a fool would think that was based purely on merit.</p>
<p>Pmrlcomm, the next time you venture to the museum center in our fair city, take a look at the display of the various early contributions by the various ethnic groups in this city. Of course the blacks had the toughest road to hoe. Blacks didn’t even have school here until over a 130 years past the founding of our city and then it was segregated. Their neighborhoods routinely assailed by hooligans. And this in a city north of the Mason-Dixon line and after the civil war. Great background/foundation for buiding wealth, strong families and economic parity in this country, wouldn’t you agree? On with fairness and equality now…</p>
<p>A form of affirmative action after the depression, during the war, and after the war helped create the middle class as we know it today. It was discrimanatory in some respects because many people of color and women to a much lesser extent, could not benefit from the policies set in place for others to capitalize on. The wealth created from those policies continue to be perpetuated to this day.</p>
<p>I’m sure many of the civil service members here in our town that have the opportunity to have a job which gives many a significant living wage, promotes home ownership, the ability to live in vibrant communities, build wealth, send their children to college, and for the most part have their socio-economic, quality of life and standard of living factors well above the state and national avg much less their ancestors would agree with you.</p>
<p>For starters, fair is not always equal and equal is not always fair. I have learned that from my years of sales management. I am faced many daily with sales leads that need to be dispersed to reps. In a perfect world everyone is of equal abilities and I could just hand them out in a round-robin format without regard to strengths and weaknesses. That, of course, is not how it goes. </p>
<p>Some reps are better at some things than another. I have a rep that excels in complex, multi-tiered opportunities. These are typically much larger $ amounts but she gets them in almost all cases. I have a business to run and the bottom line is productivity. This means that she may only get 1 lead for every 5 or 6 smallers, less complex leads that other reps receive. Is it equal, no. Is it fair, yes. It would be unfair of me to give her leads on a 1 to 1 basis. I can tell you that there are times she will receive 3 leads in a row if they are all up her alley but then she may go 50 leads without receiving one. That’s the way it goes. I get complaints all the time that I am playing favorites. Damn straight. I am making sure that leads get converted to sales. Every time, thus far, I have handed one of “her” leads off to someone else it fails miserably. I’ll test folks on occassion to see if they have it but until someone else shows they can do it consistently she’s my rain-maker. </p>
<p>If you were to attempt to apply affirmative action to this model it would muck everything up. I view this as a microcosm of real life. If I were to put her into a blind rotation with everyone else or decide that those with lesser skill deserve plumb leads because it is unfair then it wouldn’t be long before I would be out of a job and she moved on to a company that valued her skills and abilities. It’s all about ability and production. Any employer out there who doesn’t seek out and retain the best workers, regardless of ethnicity or anything else, is doing their business a disservice. I don’t see where affirmative action fits in.</p>
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<p>Because this system gives bonus point for various, unimportant factors you never end up with the best people for the job. I don’t agree that using a test to hire people is the best way to do things but since that is what is in place we have to live with it (much like the SAT’s or ACT’s). If I were the employer I would want those who scored highest on the test before any bonus points were given but since it’s the government we can’t do that… Can you really tell me that you want your life depending on that 5’6", 120 lb. female firefighter who got their job based on lowered standards? I really would like to have my fat butt pulled out by the 6’5", 240 lb. strapping guy. Thanks very much.</p>
<p>So you don’t think the preferential environments set beforehand create disparities that are apparent now? Life isn’t fair, get over it, etc, is easier to dealwith when there are far many more options that having brown skin or an ethnic sounding name or a women you don’t have to really concern your self with. When others are presented with ample opprtunities to compete equally with the best as humanly possible then there wouldn’t be a need to create the artificial equalizers. But we aren’t there and other people want and deserve an opportunity to succeed or fail in this white anglo saxon dominated society. Not being racist but racial, because it’s how I understand it to be. </p>
<p>As MLK said;</p>
<p>“A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him, to equip him to compete on a just and equal basis.” </p>
<p>The 'low income" or “social class” stratifications dont solve the inequities of AA either. What Adcoms should be looking for are kids who have overcome a significant and objectively discernable hardship to succeed at a high level. For example, the kid who has had a taste of success despite having to work 40 hours a week or attend to a sick parent or take care of siblings or has taken community college or online classes to overcome a limited HS curriculum etc. The key is achievement in the face of some provable objective hardship. The Low Income category just doesnt do it. There are plenty of low income students who attend good schools (good school districts, magnet schools, parochial schools or private schools on scholarship). There is no legitimate purpose to be served in giving them a further leg up in admissions based on mere income levels. It’s just more social engineering by the amateur anthropologists and sociologists who dominate the college admissions scene. Finaid is another story however. That kind of leg up is certainly acceptable if the applicant is objectively qualified.</p>
<p>What’s best is so subjective. I’ve yet to see many finidngs that as a result of AA policies, public or private businesses haven’t been able to function productively or remain competitive due to AA policies. It’s a red herring.</p>
<p>“More than 80% of excutives find their jobs through networking and almost 9 out of ten jobs in the overall labor market are filled by word of mouth and are never advertised.”…However, people of color are disproportunately excluded from the best word of mouth networks for jobs, due in large part to past inequity in hiring, housing and education, which has resulted in far fewer connections for people of color."</p>
<p>Seems to tie in with “it ain’t what you know but who you know.” </p>
<p>It’s pure folly to hope in the benevolence of the status quo to bring about real opportunity. You need the rule of law as well.</p>
<p>The rich want to believe that life is a meritocracy, but in reality there is a lot of self-justification there. The poor, who have had less opportunity, should definitely be given a leg up. The fact that they have accomplished what they have in light of their backgrounds is a testament to their potential. </p>
<p>My friend is 17, living with just herself and her 21 yr old sister. Her parents are poor missionaries in Azerbaijan who do not speak English and have no means of supporting them. She and her sister are entirely self-subsisting. When all others on the drill team were getting their parents to pay for $3000+ flights to the national competition, she had to put in extra hours and get a second job to be able to afford the tickets. And in spite of all this, she manages OK grades. However, she is one of the very hardest-working people I know, and her life is a constant struggle. Despite the fact that her stats are not nearly as great numerically as an applicant like myself, they are impressive when taken into the proper socioeconomic context.</p>
<p>Let’s not delude ourselves by thinking that everything is a meritocracy. That’s only what rich people say when they don’t want to confront the reality that there are many who do not have the same opportunities as them. </p>
<p>And for the record, I come from an upper-middle class background.</p>
<p>I don’t care what happened beforehand… Call me whatever you would like to call me. I’m tired of being told to feel sorry for people because of their lot in life. </p>
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<p>I agree with this completely. All things being equal these should be the deciding factors. </p>
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<p>We are going in to our 3rd generation of affirmative action. How much good has it done? If a business wants to overlook a better qualified individual because they are a woman or black that is stupid on their part and I’m pretty sure there are laws against it. I don’t think a better candidate should be passed up for a lesser candidate because of affirmative action. </p>
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<p>Meritocracy is something for an ideal world as well. Just because we don’t live in an ideal world doesn’t mean we have to give up on this system. </p>
<p>And for the record, I come from a lower-middle class background…</p>
<p>It would be interesting if we could see an admissions official or a human resources manager comment on this. So much of what we hear about affirmative action is simply speculation by people who really don’t know for sure how it works. I doubt that very many companies widely use affirmative action. I’m not even convinced it’s that common at universities. I want to see how affirmative action is actually used before I take a position on it.</p>