CON: No firm decision on affirmative action
April 23, 2014
For the past two decades, the debate on affirmative action in the college admissions process has been a heated one. Although the program certainly benefits minority groups, supporters of the program fail to recognize its many flaws that will unjustly affect students of the higher education system in America.
Affirmative action has already been struck down in California once before—and rightly so. On November 1996, Proposition 209 was approved, prohibiting public universities from considering race, sex, or ethnicity in the admission process. Since then, most state universities have experienced an increase in minority populations, as they have not actually stopped favoring minority students. However, minority populations at California’s top public universities, UC Berkeley and UCLA, have drastically decreased. The prestigious status of these universities illustrates the fact that many minority students were never really qualified to attend California’s top universities.
As a result of ethnic misrepresentation in these universities, some state officials felt that changes needed to be made. Earlier this year, the state Senate approved SCA-5, an initiative meant to repeal Prop. 209 and reintroduce race as a factor in college admissions. Despite the officials’ positive intentions, this decision will jeopardize the quality of California’s college education programs by allowing underqualified students to study at the top universities.
Furthermore, while colleges seek diversity on campus, achieving it through affirmative action builds tension by creating a sense of racial bias. This leads to the belief that minority students are accepted into colleges not based on academic achievement, but because of their race. The notion of racial bias not only aggravates the non-minority competitors through supposed racial preference, but the minority students themselves. Many minority students have come to believe that they absolutely need affirmative action to succeed in modern society. After SCA-5 was approved by the California Senate, many students believed that they would lose opportunities to attend California’s top universities to those who were far less qualified. After frenzied protest, SCA-5 was withdrawn for reconsideration and was never passed.
Some argue affirmative action is considered unconstitutional, offensive, and even racist. Such programs violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because they discriminate members of certain ethnic backgrounds by providing favorability over other students. By enforcing SCA-5, officials would have been neglecting the very foundation of this country’s government and the laws that citizens were meant to abide by.
More importantly, affirmative action does not actually create equal opportunities among students in the U.S. Supporters have been given a false impression that lowering the bar for minorities to get into more prestigious colleges will bring equal opportunities to all students, especially those that are economically disadvantaged. However, according to studies by the Hoover Institution, such programs only benefit minorities from the middle to upper class. Upper class minorities are the ones who are most easily accepted into universities. Students of higher socioeconomic classes have access to first-rate educational resources while the poorer do not. When it comes to college admissions, this disparity is undeniably an advantage that will give wealthy minorities an unfair edge, although affirmative action was originally intended to benefit minorities of lower income.
Intelligence is colorblind; it does not vary among those of different skin colors. By supporting a program that clearly proves to be futile, officials have been providing the wrong individuals with unfair benefits. It is not the minority who needs extra leverage, it is the lower class that is at a far disadvantage, and the underprivileged of this country deserve equal opportunities as the wealthy, which is where the real discrepancy in this matter resides.
