BwB #3: Affirmative Action
 

This week's Breakfast with Bob is a little outdated, but the idea stays in the news all the time. This will be the last article of mine that I will post since the rest of my articles deal with school stuff. Next week's BwB will be the start of a new format. Actually, it's what I was originally doing in the SGDC forums before this one. I apologize if this has already been beaten to death in another thread, I'm just adding some new material.


Students challenge affirmative action

In two lawsuits challenging University of Michigan admissions policies, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in favor of the Law School and, in a separate ruling, reversed part of the University’s undergraduate policy, while still allowing race to be considered in admissions. The decision will “affirm the authority of colleges and universities to recognize that all students benefit from attending a school that has a meaningful degree of racial integration” according to incoming Law School Dean Evan Caminker. The ruling was announced on June 23 of this year.

The portion of the policy that was reversed included the automatic distribution of 20 points, or one-fifth of the points needed to guarantee admission, to every ‘unrepresented minority’ applicant solely based on race. According to Chief Justice William Rehnquist the policy was “not narrowly tailored to achieve the interest in educational diversity that respondents claim justifies their program”.

This landmark case will have an enormous effect on U.S. colleges and universities by allowing them to include race in admitting students. The suits were both filed in 1997 by white applicants who challenged the use of race in the admissions process in Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger.

In September, The Young Conservatives of Texas tried to call attention to what it saw as flaws in affirmative action by holding a bake sale at Southern Methodist University, basing the prices of the cookies on the customer’s race and gender. Cookies were priced at $1 for white males, 75 cents for white females, 50 cents for Hispanics, and 25 cents for blacks. The bake sale was quickly shut down by University officials.

Affirmative action does put white males at a disadvantage, but a federal appeals court ruling in 1996 that threw out the University of Texas Law School’s affirmative action program proved that some affirmative action would be necessary to maintain a steady minority admission rate. Shortly after the ruling, African American and Hispanic student enrollment plummeted.

If we want diversity in our universities, admissions should instead be based on wealth and family income. The reason affirmative action exists is to give inner city, low income students a chance at a higher education that they would not originally have access to. Using income as a criteria will open our colleges to new minds and personalities while, at the same time, ignoring the ethnicity of the student.

AA, while outdated, is still, fundamentally, sound. There is racial discrimination still in our changing/growing society (live in a dorm with a bunch of black football players and you will understand) and there should be something done. Dont read too far into that previous sentance; I am not racist. I am merely acknowledging the fact that there is discrimination going on (against both blacks and whites), and that something should be done. However, using race as a basis for admission into a school or university is not something that we should be doing. A qualified student with good credentials can get excluded from his/her proper place of schooling just because some minority with less credentials wants in. That means they (the excluded student) will have to go somewhere else which might result in an overall decline/lack of education for them. I actually know several "minorities" who feel the same way. School admissions should be based upon academic merit; not race.

Affirmitive action is just a rather pathetic racially based means of cleaning up some of the inequity of capitolism. Unrepresented minorities is more a problem of cyclical poverty that just happens to affect certain minorities than opression.

Being from a rich background gives you head start in life, and considering the gap between african-americans and caucasions only 50 years ago, its not surprising that we are still not equal, despite the fact that what racial opression exists today is minimal.

What they should do is just make sure that everyone with the merit to have a post secondary education gets the chance. The government ought to pay for university education; what policy could benefit society more than a subsidy on producing knowledgable citizens and skilled workers? In that case, even if you are from a poor background you can still get the education you're worth, and minorities will have as good a chance as the majority.

True, true.. the government should pay for higher education, but that will never happen as the parties would have to raise taxes to a rediculous amount which the general public would not like at all. If they did that, they would lose votes; if they lose votes, they lose their power/influence. Therefore, they wont do that. Ever.

I don't know, the total ammount of university tuiton fees annually can't be THAT big a slice of annual GDP. And if it was, its simple what the government could do; they could start out with a publicly funded scholarship program, which they increase over many years until post secondary education is entirely funded by the government. Those who have benefited from this government funding will naturally want to recipricate their good fortune so that government funded higher education will gain more and more electoral support over the years as more voters have benifited from it.

Dont count on that. Your making one hell of a assumption, and assumption is the mother of all fuckups. I know European countries fund higher education, which is probably why they have a higher general standard for their citizens than us.

Eh. It seems rather outdated. 'Bias' should be given to families of poor wealth, not racial minorities. They already do this (maybe not enough), so there shouldn't be a reason for the racial bias. Really, when it comes down to it, the most discrimination nowadays is economic.

Making universities governmentally run does sound economically dangerous in the short-term. It would pay off, hopefully, but really, I doubt many people would ever go for such an economic disturbance.

I think Funny Looking summed it up best. I still think the government could pat for universities. They used to here, but then they started getting all frigging cheap as soon as it was my turn to go to university... bastard Tories. Anyhow, the US could put the shame the rest of the world if it wanted to, it just so happens you get tax cuts on the richest 1% who own 27% of the money and wind up fighting 100 billion dollars wars and waste money trying to cut off the drug trade and so on and so fourth.

Now I shine! Europe for the most part funds fully higher education. However, you have to be clever enough to get in! Britain however does not fund it fully, and are now making noise about raising fees even further, a disastrous, ignorant move.

We have here a programme aiming to get 50% of all University age people onto degree courses, with special considerations paid to minorities and people of lower economic backgrounds. The University system due to this policy, while good in theory, is going broke. University numbers jumped from 5% of Uni-age population in 1982 to 45% now, without a ninefold rise in funding, as it should have been. the government simply can't afford that, and the result has been slapdash programmes, underpaid professors who leave for the States or the Continent, and a lowering of academic standards across the boards. I think we all agree that AA in the US is something that needs to be phased out while a new emphasis on poverty and primary education (y'know, how you GET to University) takes its place.

About this bake sale: good thing it was cancelled. There would have been a fight, or at least people like me giving a black guy $1 so I could get 4 snacks. Now THAT'S working together!

I wrote a research paper on Affirmative Action, especially the way it produces nasty reverse discrimination. It's really just a stupid idea that Universities have of making themselves look diverse by just letting anyone with a minority background in. MY cousin is half Peruvian (I am full blooded caucasian, an Italian-Scot) and he's every bit as white as me, as far as mannerisms go. But he got into UT easy as pie because my Uncle is hispanic. I will get no easy entrance because Italians aren't a minority. Does that sound right to you?