At its birth, affirmative action offered hope for America. It promised to help prevent racism and stereotypes and assist minorities in getting the education and profession they deserved. Now, 50 years later, I am not sure about the hope that affirmative action is supposedly providing.
This week, the Supreme Court heard Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin, which will challenge the use of race as a factor in university admissions. The case is based on Abigail Fisher, a Caucasian student who graduated from a public high school in Texas in 2008. According to The New York Times, Fisher was denied admission to the University of Texas at Austin after an evaluation that considered a candidate’s race.
The Atlantic recently published an article challenging affirmative action in light of the Supreme Court hearing. Basically, writers Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr. argue that the students accepted by a university that gives strong preference to minorities struggle more than they succeed. Elite and rigorous universities are eager to diversify and use affirmative action as a tool to do so. However, this often results in students attending schools where they don’t fit in and where there is a large gap between their aptitude and that of their peers. This is called mismatching.
Small amounts of minority preference may indeed be beneficial, but the contemporary racial preferences used by selective schools are extremely large. According to Sander and Taylor, accepted minority students often have an SAT score of on average 300 points lower than their classmates’ scores. This creates a very negative learning environment for minority students. A 300-point gap is huge, and minority students realize that. Because of poor education standards in areas where minorities often grow up, they are often not as advanced or prepared for course work that their classmates find ordinary. Such a large difference is bound to cause both academic discouragement and social alienation. In addition, a university that accepts minoritieswho cannot handle the rigor reinforces false stereotypes by setting minority students up to fail.
According to “Increasing Faculty Diversity,” a book about affirmative action by Stephen Cole and Elinor Barber, “blacks who start college interested in pursuing a doctorate and an academic career are twice as likely to be derailed from this path if they attend a school where they are mismatched.”
In addition, a study at Duke University showed that “interracial friendships are more likely to form among students with relatively similar levels of academic preparation; thus, blacks and Hispanics are more socially integrated on campuses where they are less academically mismatched.”
In almost all instances of observation, African-Americans and Hispanics were significantly more likely to fail and drop out of their mismatched university.
No matter what decision the Supreme Court makes, changes have already been made for affirmative action on the state level. Washington, Michigan, Arizona, New Hampshire, California and Florida have banned racial preferences in admissions outright. After the ban, minority enrollment fell, but at the University of Washington “Hispanic enrollment is higher and black enrollment is comparable to before race was banned,” according to an article by The Associated Press.
As the tides turn with affirmative action, I think we will see more universities basing their preferences on economic inequality instead of racial inequality. An economic affirmative action program could consider income and wealth as a factor in admission, and therefore acknowledge discrimination indirectly.
Moral of the story: Though affirmative action based on socioeconomic status may not be as simplistic as asking for skin color, the time has come that universities adjust to the real issues and root causes of lack of diversity in colleges. The current means of affirmative action being based on race ignore the fact that reform is needed in primary and secondary schools. The beginning of a lifetime of dedication to education has to start somewhere, and right now, that starting place is atrocious for most inner-city or poor children. Whether that change comes through the state or Supreme Court, so be it.
