The Irony of Affirmative Action
Co-Editor-in-Chief Wesley Ding wrote an editorial response to this Op-Ed: “Affirmative Action must be reformed, not eliminated”
College Admissions.
The phrase terrorizes panicking high school seniors scrambling to finish their applications, looms menacingly over anxious juniors, and instills a general sense of unease among sophomores and freshmen. After all, it is college, widely considered as the modern rite of passage to adulthood when you can finally embark on your career in the professional world. It is where you form many of your most important relationships, some of which will possibly last a lifetime. Some zealous parents say that admission to a university is the culmination of their child’s life, and they’re not completely unfounded in their belief. The grades the students have received, the skills and hobbies they have nurtured, and everything worthwhile they have done are all taken into consideration during college admissions.
Something so important and life-changing should be fair and transparent, providing equal opportunities to those with equal merit. As of now, however, admission is also heavily influenced by the color of your skin in many universities nationwide.
Affirmative action is the policy of favoring members of a disadvantaged group that have been treated unjustly in the past. It was initially implemented in the 1960s during the tumult of the Civil Rights Movement as a way to combat discrimination against minorities in the employment process, and it eventually spread to college admissions as well. Despite its original good intentions, affirmative action has become an obsolete patchwork solution to a complex issue that not only fails to actually help the intended beneficiaries but also harms innocent students.
Superficially, affirmative action aims to help certain minority groups and give them a competitive chance after years of being subjected to prejudice and discrimination. However, the methods employed to achieve these goals have a dark side: for the admission rates of certain ethnic groups to increase, others must decrease accordingly.
At UC Berkeley, for example, California Proposition 209, which took effect in 1998, prohibited all state governmental institutions from considering race in public employment, contracting, and education. In 1997, before Proposition 209 took effect, admission rates for Black and Latino applicants at UC Berkeley soared at 50 percent and 45 percent respectively, while White and Asian-American applicants hovered at 30 percent and 20 percent, respectively; however, following Proposition 209, admission rates for Black and Latino applicants plummeted to 20 percent and 21 percent, and White and Asian-American applicants both saw an increase of 5 percent, putting them well above Black and Latino applicants. While an increase of 5 percent in terms of admission rate may not seem much as compared to the 20 plus percent decrease for Black and Latino applicants, when considering the larger numbers of White and Asian-American applicants, this increased admittance is roughly equivalent to the Black and Latino decrease. This serves to show that in order for more Black and Latino students to be admitted, colleges must cut into the admissions of other ethnic groups. By admitting less qualified minority students, affirmative action deprives the opportunities of many unfortunate White and Asian-American applicants who would otherwise be admitted.
Another study, published by Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford of Princeton, measured how race affects admissions by analyzing SAT scores. The study revealed that, on their submitted SAT scores, Black applicants received a bonus of 230 points and Hispanics by 185 points, while Asian-Americans were penalized by 50 points. Keeping in mind that the SAT is only on a scale of 1600, not only does affirmative action give a huge advantage to Black and Hispanic applicants, it also actively works against Asian-Americans. The very thing that it is meant to avoid—racial discrimination—is being employed against Asian-Americans, who did not participate in unjust treatment of other ethnic groups in the past and who were generally, in fact, also victims of discrimination. In other words, affirmative action requires the discrimination to be redirected towards different groups which, in the case of Asian-Americans, may not have done anything to deserve such treatment.
The patchwork solution of affirmative action fails to see the bigger picture. Through affirmative action, many students who are only minimally qualified are admitted, often at the cost of denying a spot for other more qualified students. While it is true that students who are admitted through affirmative action can still catch up to their peers, the difference in performance and competence is particularly concerning in some fields. According to the data released by the Association of American Medical Colleges, Black and Latino applicants are often admitted while scoring considerably less on the MCAT (standardized test for medical school) than Asian-American and White applicants, despite having the same GPA. The difference in admission rates becomes especially pronounced in the lower brackets of the GPA ranges: the admission rate for Black applicants with GPAs of between 3.00 to 3.19 is 24 percent, while for Asian-Americans it is 11 percent, despite having higher mean MCAT scores. As the standards are noticeably lowered for favored minority groups, a large portion of their enrollees barely qualify in terms of GPA and MCAT, while for Asian-American and White applicants admission is much more competitive and only the best are offered spots. In the field of medicine, the health, and possibly lives, of patients hang in delicate balance in the hands of doctors. As a patient, do you care whether the surgeons operating on you are ethnically diverse, or would you rather have them be the most capable? Since people could never be sure whether the minority doctor treating them was only admitted through the help of affirmative action, it creates a negative stigma surrounding minority doctors as being less competent than Asian or White counterparts.
While affirmative action does increase the number of minority enrollees via artificial boosts in admission rates, it fails to address the root problem that they are, on average, less qualified in comparison to other groups, which is why they needed the boost in the first place. Affirmative action only exacerbates the problem of academic mismatch when a student is placed into a class in which his or her abilities are significantly behind his or her peers. Professor Heriot writes in her essay:
While academically gifted under-represented minority students are hardly rare, there are not enough to satisfy the demand of top schools. When the most prestigious schools relax their admissions policies in order to admit more minority students, they start a chain reaction, resulting in a substantial credentials gap at nearly all selective schools.
By lowering the bar for their admission, colleges are able to enroll more minority students, but quantity rarely correlates with quality. In top law schools, one study shows that “more than 50 percent of African-American law students (many of whom had been admitted pursuant to affirmative action policies) were in the bottom 10 percent of their class” and that “the dropout rate among African-Americans students was more than twice of their white peers”. The situation is the same for STEM fields, too. By attending schools in which they rank at the very bottom of the class, many minority students are discouraged from pursuing careers in law and science and drop out much more often as compared to other groups that did not have the benefit of affirmative action. Instead of pursuing a degree at a less prestigious but more academically fitting university, many minority students suffer from academic mismatch and fail to obtain a degree at all.
As civilization and many societies become progressively liberal (an ideology that promotes fairness), it is a shock that affirmative action still runs rampant, especially at the top schools in the country. As of now, affirmative action is an obsolete policy that not only fails to truly help its intended beneficiaries but also devalues the merit of innocent students. Ironically, it is as Martin Luther King Jr. once stated in his famous speech: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” I wholeheartedly agree. Instead of taking the shortcut of attaching an artificial boost to minority student applications for them to compete on the same level, society should focus on giving them the tools to do so without the boost so that they can be admitted on their own merit.
Featured Image Harvard University is currently facing a lawsuit for its allegedly discriminatory admissions practices courtesy of Todd van Hoosear via Flickr.