<p>"f that same inner city black person had grown up in an affluent suburb, he would have had higher sats and a higher gpa, etc. i" not necessarily true... the poorest asian kids do better than the richest black kids.</p>
<p>"i never had any fancy SAT prep courses or parents threatening to take away my nonexistant luxuries if i didn't do well in school." boo freakity hoo. If you spent the time u spent on CC reviewing for the SATs, you'd have done better. Secondly, my parents don't threaten me to do well at school, yet I still do well.</p>
<p>"Can we agree that affirmative action is at least flawed?"</p>
<p>Not really... The issue is that the top private schools, seeing diversity as essential to their institutional/educational goals, will always practice affirmative action regardless of SAT score / GPA gaps, as is their right to do so. </p>
<p>Even if minority students scored the same as white students on SATs, the fact is that for HYP, minority students make up less of their share of the applicant pools of private universities, meaning that "affirmative action" will always take place (i.e. schools will favor minority applicants over white applicants with the same SAT scores and grades).</p>
<p>It's not a generalization, it was the results of a study. It showed than on average blacks who came from families that earned over 100k were outscored by asians who came from families with less than 10k. I'll find the site.</p>
<p>I saved the article on my computer. It's from the Journal of Black Education, and I can send it to you, if you want.</p>
<p>Here are some higlights:
There are a number of reasons explaining the continuing and growing black-white SAT scoring gap. A major factor in the SAT racial scoring gap is family income. There is a direct correlation between family income and SAT scores. For both blacks and whites, as income goes up, so do test scores. Some 28 percent of all black SAT test takers came from families with annual incomes below $20,000. Only 5 percent of white test takers came from low-income families. At the other extreme, 5 percent of all black test takers came from families with incomes of more than $100,000. The comparable figure for white test takers is 24 percent. But income alone does not explain the racial scoring gap. Consider these facts: </p>
<p>• Whites from families with incomes of less than $10,000 had a mean SAT score of 980. This is 123 points higher than the national mean for all blacks.
• Whites from families with incomes below $10,000 had a mean SAT test score that was 46 points higher than blacks whose families had incomes of between $80,000 and $100,000.
• Blacks from families with incomes of more than $100,000 had a mean SAT score that was 142 points below the mean score for whites from families at the same income level.</p>
<p>Perhaps even more troubling than the data on parent education is the finding that
mean SAT I scores for African Americans from high-income families (810 for >$60,000)
are lower than the mean SAT I scores for Whites and Asians from the low-income category
(899 and 818 for <$20,000); and high-income Latinos score only slightly higher than
low-income White students (904 versus 899)</p>
<p>umm...and that has nothing to do with what you said. you said the poorest asians score better than the most affluent blacks. your "stats" dont prove that, because they say nothing about asian scores.</p>
<p>Perhaps even more troubling than the data on parent education is the finding that
mean SAT I scores for African Americans from high-income families (810 for >$60,000)
are lower than the mean SAT I scores for Whites and Asians from the low-income category</p>
<p>I agree with Ilovepoker, universities should be color-blind, just as most are need-blind when it comes to financial aid. It makes no sense that an underqualified candidate can get into a selective school because they are black.</p>
<p>I also find it funny how people reacted when some students last year at some college demonstrated how AA is unfair. They held a bake sale and charged white and asians the same price, but made no charge for african americans. Some students got so angry at the demonstrators that they started throwing things at them and attacking them.</p>
<p>Laertes: You think that colleges (society, et al) should be colorblind, or the college acceptance process should be colorblind? Don't you think that diversity is..err..a necessity? Shouldn't race be given credence (maybe not in the Affirmative Action sense) because..after all...it is rather part of the applicant's identity.</p>
<p>I'll get to you in a jiffy, thestonedpandas (homework beckons).</p>
<p>oh please. i think you guys are blowing this a bit out of proportion. very rarely are there situations where there are 2 students, 1 white (1500 SAT, 4.0, 800x3) and 1 black (1100, 2.5, 500x3) and the black one gets in. if those situations exist, they dont happen @ Penn (or other upper-tier colleges).</p>
<p>what generally happens is that a black student with a lower sat score (but still a great student) will get in over a white student with higher scores. i dont have any problem with that, because there's nothing wrong with that. college admissions, job hiring, etc., are all SUBJECTIVE. just because you dont think the black kid should get in over a white kid with higher scores, the black kid may bring something more to the campus, job, or whatever.</p>
<p>I think the point here is, no one is saying diversity isn't important. It is and I would argue that having a homogeneous student body is not a healthy learning environment. However, when standards are lowered and exceptions are made for members of a certain ethnicity to simply fulfill racial diversity, that isn't fair to all the people who are not of that race and are more qualified for admissions to that school. It is the poor structure and ambiguity of Afirmative Action as a system that hinders more than helps a university in its quest for a diverse and at the same time extremely inteligent student body. I would say for its negative effects it should be extremely reformed if not abolished all together.</p>