Affirmative Action is a Band Aid Solution
As we progress through our years at KIS, the impending college admissions only become more daunting. For many of us, there will come a time when we sit down to pour our hearts out in our applications. Hitting send with our trembling fingers, we can only hope that our efforts will pay off. Yet, many might find it odd that in a supposed color-blind society, schools require a student’s ethnicity or race in their applications to determine if they deserve a place at their school, something just as uncontrollable as the color of our eyes or our height. These policies exist due to affirmative action.
Affirmative action can trace its roots back to the Kennedy administration in 1961. In a time of racial turmoil and segregation, Kennedy issued Executive Orders 19025 and 11114 to help alleviate racial discrimination during employment. After his assasination, President Lyndon B. Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which officially banned racial and gender discrimination in the workplace. Since then, affirmative action has grown and was eventually established into the college admission process in the 1970s, albeit tentatively. While an affirmative action policy largely depends on the school, this generally means that colleges will tend to select minorities to reach “targeted goals.” To an extent, these policies have worked. White students made up 83 percent of university students in 1976, while only 57 percent of university students were white in 2016. Even after accounting for factors such as immigration or population, a large portion is still a result of the affirmative action policies set in place.
However, 2022 is a much different time than 1961, or even just 10 years ago. Many are conflicted about the actual goal of affirmative action, and if it has lost its purpose over the years. In an effort to diminish systemic and societal racism, affirmative action may have actually created systemic racism, just not to those some might expect. For others, merit and talent has lost its value to diversity. Notwithstanding diversity is still important. Bringing together people of different worlds garners creativity and innovation, whether it be in the classroom or the workplace. It also advocates inclusion and an acceptance of differences.
The real question, however, lies in the extent to which merit can be ignored to promote diversity. This is not an easy question to answer, as neither merit nor diversity are accurately measurable or quantifiable, contrary to what the current college admission system believes. However, some recent bans of affirmative action shine light on the role of affirmative action in increasing diversity. Michigan and California are two of the nine states that have banned affirmative action in college admission processes. According to UC Berkeley's census data in 2021, 23.2% of their 6945 students were part of the underrepresented minority groups. Though affirmative action is prohibited, they still maintain measures to ensure diversity through other criteria. Nonetheless, the numbers don’t lie, and they show a rate of diversity lower than other universities.
However, critics of affirmative action maintain that this is not attributable to systemic racism, but is rather a pipeline issue. This is the theory that the lack of diversity is a result of the lack of talent or “merit” in the underrepresented groups. Still, this is no less of a problem than affirmative action as it might literally be systemic racism at play.
Instead of a studentent’s ethnicity, the bias of affirmative action should focus on the socioeconomic status of students. It has been proven countless times that poverty is a cycle. Those born into poverty can be trapped for generations to come. And for those that argue that this would not help ethnic diversity in classrooms, it should be noted that minorities consist of the highest portions of the poverty level in America. For example, African Americans make up 27.4% of the poverty population, though they only make up 13.6% of the U.S. population. Thus, with a higher chance of getting into college in spite of their socioeconomic obstacles, many of these families will be bolstered out of the vicious cycle of poverty. Consequently, this will increase the level of talent in the college admissions process that will eliminate the idea that this is a pipeline issue.
Regardless, affirmative action is without a doubt a band aid solution. To reach a truly color-blind society, we need to start at the beginning of education where we can wipe out racism. We need to help these marginalized racial groups and minorities to be at a level of merit comparative to their peers at admissions so that affirmative action is unneeded. The students need to be funded, rather than implementing policies like affirmative action. And while that may seem far-fetched given the current state of America, many hopeful students, myself included, will continue to hope for this future.