<p>Those in favor.....please explain why it is in the best interest of America to reinstate racial quotas/discrimination in order to make up for the past? (irony)</p>
<p>Those against.... please explain why and suggestions on how to improve diversity w/o disadvantaging some </p>
<p>most people i have talked to are against, but there isn't a push by the community to phase it out. </p>
<p>the URM's i know have the opinion that it really isn't fair, but they certainly aren't going to be the ones complaining </p>
<p>a few things i have noted during the debate:</p>
<p>AA discounts the achievements of the URM who didn't need that bump to succeed. </p>
<p>Engineered diversity leads to "clicks" in college who only associate with each other, not a homogenous community.</p>
<p>AA doesn't hurt non-URM percentages that greatly</p>
<p>Lets not go here. If you do a search for affirmative action, you will see a couple of threads about it. People feel very strongly about this issue, and it accomplishes nothing.</p>
<p>Blanket AA is a poor choice...and setting specific quotas is also not good as it leads to a focus on numbers regardless of quality. However I would argue that a significant amount of discrimination still exists against URM in many sectors, it's just not as horribly blatant as it once was...read "American Apartheid" for a discussion.</p>
<p>However, I believe that a certain attention needs to be paid to the fact that for some individuals are URM's the education they've received up to that point has been poor. </p>
<p>I'm not sure that made sense, but what I'm trying to get at is that students should not be punished for not being provided a competitive education. I'm not saying that all public education needs to lead to equal results, but it should lead to equal opportunity for those results.</p>
<p>Further, I think race is probably a poor marker, as the so called "racial gaps" are erased when controlling for socioeconomic status. But given that race and class are so intertwined in this country it is an easier way to go about things, and a lot harder to fake (since I'm sure that some amount of fraud goes on to take advantage of the system by those who are not currently getting an advantage).</p>
<p>30-40 years ago we had cities burning, near-insurrection in the streets and in the ghettos. Certain groups perceived that they were not getting their slice of the American pie. It was difficult to pursuade them that they should be fighting and dying for their country under such circumstances.</p>
<p>However fair the traditional policies of admission to, ultimately, the ranks of the middle and upper-middle classes seemed to be, there was a recognition that these practices were not, at the end of the day, achieving racially-balanced results. And the perpetuation of such results had the potential to contribute to continued social instability, racial warfare (or at least antisocial behavior), and race-based inequity in results.</p>
<p>So they tried to do something about it, and this is what they came up with. It may not be great, but the status quo was deemed unacceptable, from a societal perspective at least.</p>
<p>You really should read the threads linked. </p>
<p>You would probably also gain from reading about prior decisions about affirmative action. Your question is a bit behind the times--for one things, quotas aren't generally considered lawful, and the argument that one must make up for past discriminiation is no longer considered a strong argument for AA either. You'll bring more to the table when you know more about the present-day discussions about affirmative action.</p>
<p>Ernie Pascarella (U. Iowa) and Pat Terenzini (Penn State) have for the past 15 years synthesized all the research done over the past 30-40 years on college students and outcomes of the college experience. They are the undisputed authorities on the topic of what matters most in creating impactful college experiences. Their findings fill over 1000 pages, but they claim that the bottomline is that the most powerful learning and growth component in any college experience is exposure to "The Different" - multiple perspectives from diverse people and cultures.</p>
<p>I agree that this topic has been discussed MANY times. If you want to know what people think, peruse the threads that taxguy found. (If you have facebook) There's even a facebook group dedicated to this topic that has tons of posts on this issue. Go look there for people's responses.</p>