In medias res, the participants swore to ran as if their lives depended on it. On your mark…, get set…, go! Imagine for a moment that life was an actual race and like told as a child, there is a distinct starting point and finish line. No cheating allowed. So they train as any responsible athlete would throughout the years. Midway through, the referees decided a group of runners should be held a lap, some should be granted a lap, and some have to run as best they could to compensate for either other groups of participants. Bearing in mind that at any time the rules can change and it is unclear of which group they will fall into while running. Practically, this is what affirmative action is. The United States government and Supreme Court are the referees, and a participant’s ethnicity determines how many laps they may be or may not be granted. If you are economically fortunate, you may get some additional help with a trainer or have to go at it alone. This scenario shows an example of inequality and viewpoints on affirmative action. Colleges should not use affirmative action to determine who they admit.
Affirmative action (AA) is a policy that allows preferential treatment to women, minorities and other marginalized groups, but in this case, it means race-conscious admissions. According to a 2017 survey by the American Council of Education, around 30% of four-year colleges apply to race as a factor in admissions and 60% of prestigious colleges have adopted this policy (Zamani-Gallaher et al. P. 9). The policy is mostly used by private universities, many of which argue that it is important in maintaining a diverse campus that not only serves an educational purpose but also benefits all students. However, the policy is not universally adopted, states such as California, Oklahoma, and Michigan have laws that prohibit against affirmative action in admissions at public universities. AA was formulated in an attempt to not only put an end to discrimination, but also to make up for the ugly history of racism in the past. The policy was implemented in 1964 when President John F. Kennedy passed the Executive order that mandated all government-funded programs to be actively involved in ensuring that marginalized groups were treated well and given jobs (Zamani-Gallaher et al. P.45). Later it was expanded to other areas in healthcare, the education system among others.
Arguments for affirmative action
Affirmative action leads to reverse discrimination. Looking around, one can argue that the current status of our society indicates that the policy has been a success. However, critics of the policy believe that the policy is only not necessary anymore, but it also leads to more problems than solutions. Affirmative action policies were formulated to finally put an end to racial discrimination and give everybody level playing field, but in reality, it failed to do that and made it even worse. A lot of white students today, despite having high scores and being more qualified, are being discriminated against during college admissions because many institutions favor the minorities.
Another reason why the affirmative policy should be banned because it regards the wrong individuals. AA routinely rewards students who do not qualify for such opportunities they do not deserve them. Take, for instance, an unqualified student is able to get admissions into Harvard just because the admission standards are set lower for them. While not all minorities take advantage of the situation, it is true to say that some of them use their status to get better opportunities at the expense of those who deserved it.
Affirmative action should be eliminated in college admissions because it encourages students to seek easy access rather than work hard. According to the American Council of Education, AA is no longer helping students who are unprivileged. Students become weaker academically and much more dependent. The sad truth of the matter is, that there are very many bright and highly talented minority students. However, not all of them discover their true potential because they focus too much on “receiving help” than “working hard”. If affirmative action was abolished in college admissions, these students would be able to discover and use their potential and talent ("Arguments For and Against Affirmative Action - StateUniversity.com Blog" par 4). Minorities should realize that coming from a poor family or being from a minority round does not limit their ability to fairly compete. Take, for instance, Oprah Winfrey a multi-millionaire was from a poor family and even former President Barrack Obama came from a poor background.
Affirmative action outshines real accomplishments and tarnishes it. As stated earlier, affirmative action in college admissions give minority students more admission chances and a lot of them have benefited from it. However, by getting special treatment during admissions, it sends the impression that students from these minority groups only achieve success because of affirmative action. Even though minority students are able to succeed in life through hard work and intelligence, their achievement is degraded by other students because of preferential treatment. At its worst, it could even make the students question their own achievement, which could harm their emotional and mental health.
Affirmative action is wrong because it places a stigma on the minorities and increases racial tension in schools. The affirmative action policy places the minority students through a difficult time in school where no matter how hard they work to secure admissions into prestigious schools, they are stigmatized. If the AA policy is not abolished, the stigma against minority students in colleges will continue. AA causes racial tension in colleges. In 2008, the Abigail Fisher case made the headlines for almost two weeks when it was revealed that she was denied admission to the University of Texas at Austin because she is white. She filed a lawsuit against the university because she felt that she deserved that spot that was instead given to a non-white student, inferring that she was discriminated against because she was white. However, according to a report by the Washington post, the university claimed that she was not qualified for admission and it had nothing to with her statement. Her story resulted in the Supreme Court case, Fisher vs. the University of Texas at Austin.
But who should make the decision on whether affirmative action should be applied in the college admissions process? In the past few months, the University of Texas at Austin received much criticism, due to the scandal, which exposed the fact that barely 5% of the school’s population was black students on campus, in comparison to the 23% of other black students in Delaware (Ivy Couch Inc. Par 2). Sure, affirmative action has good intent. But imagine what a white student, who dedicated a lot of time in their studies and qualifies for admissions at an elite university, but is denied because the only space left was already reserved for a minority student, even though the student is less qualified than they are. That is so unfair. Opponents of this policy maintain that it is morally wrong and it promotes reverse discrimination. Reverse discrimination is a policy that victimizes the majority when it comes to education and even in employment.
Affirmative action defeats equal opportunity. In America’s history of racism and white supremacy even in education create the gap between white and noon white students at so many levels in higher learning institutions (Alon, P.209). The policy has to stop because it causes more debates, tension, and lawsuits, which beats its purpose. If colleges think they can create a diverse school by using affirmative action, they are wrong. It only worsens the division between races in colleges by limiting the number of students to accept. That even there are more minority students, who deserve to get these admissions, they would not get the chance to be accepted if the school admission limit has been achieved.
Arguments against affirmative action
Affirmative action is an ethical issue that has raised a lot of debate about whether or not it increases fairness in the admission process. In addition, the role of affirmative action in improving diversity and fulfilling academic missions of these universities. Supporters of affirmative action claim that the policy makes up for social inequalities by fairly evaluating each student. The purpose of affirmative action is to increase the number of underrepresented minority students. Different students come from different social backgrounds and some are often disadvantaged to their social situation. For example, students from families without university graduates are less likely to succeed in high school and those who come from communities that do not regularly speak English are more likely to perform poorly on standardized tests. The underrepresentation is due to these social disadvantages and therefore affirmative action does not make it easy for minority students, but instead, it makes up for their disadvantage.
Another argument or affirmative action states that the policy promotes a diversified student group that generates a productive learning environment. There's a lot that Students can learn besides attending lectures and taking notes. Students also learn a lot from each other and this reason, the student body needs to be highly diversified. Affirmative action ensures that colleges admit students from different social, economic and cultural backgrounds so that each student contributes differently towards community development (Gersen, par. 5). The policy reassures that all students of all ethnic groups are equally represented in colleges. By lowering the standards for admission for minority students, affirmative action raises the quality of the student body and makes up or the academic disadvantages faced by these students.
Affirmative action was formed to reduce discrimination during college admissions but has in effect made it worse. Arguments for affirmative action maintain that the policy creates a better learning environment by creating a diversified student body but it does not. In an academic community, the diversity of opinion is important, not racial diversity. Affirmative action provides discriminates and favors some students based on the color of their skin. The racial background does is not relevant in an academic context. Affirmative action discriminates against students based exclusively on their race.
Colleges should not use affirmative action to determine who they admit. Arguments in support of Affirmative action states that it helps socially disadvantaged or minority groups. In fact, in most cases, affirmative action does the exact opposite of what it was intended. Instead, it only makes it easy minority students to get admissions into elite by propagating socioeconomic inequalities while it completely ignores lower class members. The percentage of students that benefit from affirmative actions in colleges is minute. According to an article by The New York Times, the admission team at Reed College turned away needy students. The university was running low on money yet too many students needed financial aid. In effect, the director of finance and loans allegedly instructed the admissions department to strike out more than 80 needy students before prior to their admission (Crosby, and VanDeVeer p. 77). A lot of universities like Reed use the affirmative action policy to accept student not based on their merit, but based on their wealth. The study revealed that even during admissions, the financial department produced a separate wait list for students whose financial information was incomplete.
Affirmative action by the numbers
If the objective of affirmative action was to allow low-income households to send their children to school to secure their chance of getting employment in the future, the policy has not done its work. Enrollment rates that are based on income have not changed. In 2012, there were more than 80% of Asian graduates 70% of high school Latino graduates, 68% of African American enrolled in a college. Within a decade, the difference between white and black student college attendance increased by an average of 13% (Glater, par.2). In the 2013-2016 academic year, 85% of freshman graduates were white and only 64% were black students. More than 80% of high-income graduates proceed to college in comparison to 65% of middle-class student and only 48% of low-income students. These gaps have not tapered or over three decades.
A recent study revealed that because of affirmative actions, the number of black and Hispanic students have increased in colleges and in states such as California where race-conscious admissions were banned, the number of underrepresented minorities has reduced. Yet, the students that are affected the most are Asian-American students who are expected to score 100 more points on their SATs compared to other students to have a fair shot of admission at a prestigious university. The study also revealed that while comparing similar results, white students are thrice more likely to get admission than Asian students. Latinos are twice as likely to get admission as whites, and African American students were six times as likely to be gain admission as whites. More recently, a lawsuit against Harvard stated that it discriminated against Asian students led to the discovery that while 25% of applicants at any Ivy League universities were of Asian descent between 2013 and 2017, only 18% of the Asian applicants got accepted during that period. The large gap between applicants and admitted students is the widest compared to other races. What’s more, a larger share of applicants with the highest SAT scores are Asian-American students.
Affirmative actions cause a lot of harm to minority students. Affirmative action allows low grades during admissions that result in an academic mismatch. For instance, in one study conducted at an elite law school, more than half black students, many of which may have been admitted in accordance with affirmative action policies perform the poorest in their class. The rate of college dropout among African-American students (21%) and Hispanic students (18.3) is twice that of white people (8.2%). When a student's credits at the time of admission rank them at the bottom of their class, it comes as no surprise when they fail, drop out or switch to other majors. Because of affirmative action policies, the issue gets worse when fewer minorities are accepted into careers in science, technology and engineering fields. Students should, therefore, be advised to apply to universities where they will perform best. For example, the ban of race-conscious admissions in California led to fewer dropouts and higher grades. Before the policy was banned, California witnessed affirmative action-encouraged dropouts and poor grades. Failure rates reported that 15% of black students and 19% of American-Indian students were academically oppressed in comparison to only 4% of white students (Johnston, par. 3). After the policy was abolished, colleges like UC-San Diego and UC- Santa Cruz are some of the most prestigious Universities in California taking in roughly 12% of California high school graduates.
In conclusion, when a policy widely accepted by respected institutions for more than a generation without getting close to achieving its objective, perhaps there is a problem with the goal. Colleges should not use affirmative action to determine who they admit. Excellence ought to be celebrated everywhere it can be found, and affirmative action policies challenge colleges’ capability to explore it. This discrimination is harmful to those who are discriminated against. You don’t have to be the best to be successful. Different people have different talents and they are not proportionally distributed in a reasonable society, it is therefore time to drop colleges’ race-conscious admission. Just like in a race, participants are rewarded according to how they perform and not who deserves to perform, that is why they race. The race participants are the graduates from high school who deserve fair admission based on their merit and not financial or racial background.
Works Cited
"Arguments For and Against Affirmative Action - StateUniversity.com Blog." Online University Degree Search - U.S. University Directory - State Universities and College Rankings, www.stateuniversity.com/blog/permalink/Affirmative-Action-Arguments-For-and-Against.html.
Alon, Sigal. Race, Class, And Affirmative Action. Russell Sage Foundation, 2015, 2015, p. 211.
Crosby, Faye J, and Cheryl VanDeVeer. Sex, Race, And Merit. University Of Michigan Press, 2000.
Ivy Couch Inc. "Why Affirmative Action Is Good | Affirmative Action Blog." Ivy Coach, 15 Feb. 2018, www.ivycoach.com/the-ivy-coach-blog/college-admissions/defending-affirmative-action/.
Jeannie Suk Gersen. "The Uncomfortable Truth About Affirmative Action and Asian-Americans." The New Yorker, www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-uncomfortable-truth-about-affirmative-action-and-asian-americans.
Jonathan D. Glater. "Reed College, in Need, Closes a Door to Needy Students." Breaking News, World News " Multimedia - The New York Times, 9 June 2009, www.nytimes.com/2009/06/10/business/economy/10reed.html.
Maureen-Johnston. "Fisher V. University of Texas at Austin." SCOTUSblog, 18 Feb. 2015, www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/fisher-v-university-of-texas-at-austin-2/.
Zamani-Gallaher, Eboni M et al. The Case For Affirmative Action On Campus. Stylus Publishing, LLC., 2009, 2009.
