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Pros And Cons Of Affirmative Action In Colleges

984 Words4 Pages

In order to access higher education, most educational institutions require applicants to list their race as a component to their admissions decision. Affirmative action established this factor to provide equality for ethnic minority students. However, since the process primarily benefits minorities, Caucasian applicants such as Allan Bakke and Abigail Fisher have challenged the ideals of affirmative action, claiming that racial components instead served as a factor for their college rejections. The consistent amount of affirmative action cases has motivated some educational institutions to question their stance on racial admission components. While certain scholars argue that affirmative action promotes equality, other experts argue that it …show more content…

Rohit Joshi, who serves as a student at John Hopkins University, states in his article, “It’s Time to Change Affirmative Action in Colleges,” that affirmative action
“over­corrects” racial “bias” by providing minorities with “advantages.” Joshi’s word choice conveys his criticizing tone which enhances his idea that affirmative action does not help minorities in a fair manner. Instead of equalizing every student’s benefits, Joshi believes affirmative action provides minorities with more benefits that discriminate against non­minorities. In response to Stanford University’s consideration of re­evaluating affirmative action policies, authors of The Diversity Myth: "Multi­culturalism" and the Politics of Intolerance at
Stanford, David Sacks and Peter Thiel, state that the purpose of affirmative action was to
“redress” discrimination and develop “integration” among enrolled students. However, Sacks and Thiel utilize the observations of Thomas Sowell to dispute the positive outlooks …show more content…

Based on these reasons, Sacks and Thiel believe that instead of accomplishing its purpose of putting an end to discrimination, affirmative action has instead promoted discrimination and unequal rights to certain students.
In order to solve the issues of affirmative action, the authors suggest that the “sole criterion” for admissions should revolve around personal “achievements” which race can not be categorized into since they describe it as a personal “trait.” By focusing solely on merit, colleges would be evaluating students based on aspects that are considered to be non­discriminative.
Therefore, colleges would not have to endure any questioning regarding the admission of any of its enrolled students.
In the end, the decision to continue affirmative action has served its purpose for African
American writers such as Neblett and is utilized as the primary method for aiding disadvantaged minorities achieve equal educational benefits to non­minorities. However, other critics declare that affirmative action discriminates against non­minority races, and it does not primarily

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