Affirmative on the Affirmative Action

The usual argument against affirmative action goes like this--would you rather have the doctor operating on you be the dude who got hired because she was the best in her class, or because she was a woman/black/etc.?

I do believe, though, that there are times and places that call for aff action. The most obvious is when there's been a long tradition of prejudice in a country or industry, aff action might be the only way to break apart that trend and allow for a new future. That's the idea behind a limited aff action, where it's in place for a few decades, and then when you feel the playing ground has been levelled, you stop.

But there's also a problem with what we consider "merit" to be, as this NYT article points out. There might be an advantage to having a woman or a minority on your team, let's say if you're the cops, in terms of community relations, treating citizens fairly etc. Or as this writer says, what about the merit that comes from having led a more difficult life, one where you had to struggle for everything you got?

A person might have a lower education level, but what if that's because they didn't always eat properly because they were poor; or in the case of many poor students, they had to work several jobs. And there's a psychological stress toll from these struggles.

In any case, what's the harm in allowing a percentage of non-SAT based entrances at your university. You're not performing surgery yet. No one's going to get hurt because this person's sitting in a classroom.



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article here

AMERICANS are committed to the belief that everyone, no matter how humble his origins, has a chance to rise to the top. Our leading colleges and universities play a pivotal role in this national narrative, for they are considered major pathways to power and privilege.
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Just how skewed the system is toward the already advantaged is illustrated by the findings of a recent study of 146 selective colleges and universities, which concluded that students from the top quartile of the socioeconomic hierarchy (based on parental income, education and occupation) are 25 times more likely to attend a “top tier” college than students from the bottom quartile.

Yet at least since the 1970s, selective colleges have repeatedly claimed — most recently in amicus briefs submitted to the Supreme Court in the landmark affirmative case concerning the University of Michigan — to give an edge in admissions to disadvantaged students, regardless of race. So it came as a rude shock a few years ago when William Bowen, the former president of Princeton, and his associates discovered, in a rigorous study of 19 selective colleges, that applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds, whether defined by family income or parental education, “get essentially no break in the admissions process.”

The paucity of students from poor and working-class backgrounds at the nation’s selective colleges should be a national scandal. Yet the problem resides not so much in discrimination in the admissions process (though affirmative action for the privileged persists in preferences for the children of alumni and big donors) as in the definition of merit used by the elite colleges. For by the conventional definition, which relies heavily on scores on the SAT, the privileged are the meritorious; of all students nationwide who score more than 1300 on the SAT, two-thirds come from the top socioeconomic quartile and just 3 percent from the bottom quartile.

Only a vigorous policy of class-based affirmative action that accounts for the huge class differences in educational opportunity has a chance of altering this pattern. This change should be accompanied by a fundamental re-examination of the very meaning of “merit.”

Is resilience in the face of deprivation a form of achievement? Should universities expect — and even demand — higher levels of achievement from applicants who have enjoyed every social and educational advantage? Does the emphasis on outstanding extracurricular accomplishments privilege already privileged students who have the time, the resources and the opportunities to display such accomplishments?

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One of my favorites is the idea of a lottery. This could take the form of reserving a modest number of places in the freshman class — say 5 percent to 10 percent — for applicants who, having met a high academic threshold, would be selected at random. While the admissions office would know the identities of the students admitted by lottery, no one else — not faculty, not employers and not the students themselves — would.