Thursday, October 11, 2012
Political Mayhem Thursday: Diversity and Affirmative Action
The arguments yesterday in the Supreme Court about affirmative action have me thinking about these tough issues and the value of diversity. It is, truly, a hard question.
Many, many years ago, I left Grosse Pointe to start my freshman year at William and Mary in Virginia. When I got there, I found a fascinating mix of people who challenged one another in complex ways.
Race aside, there were three large blocs of students at William and Mary:
1) A big group of students from the DC suburbs, most of whom had excelled at very good public schools.
2) About 35% of the class was comprised of out-of-state students, who usually had better credentials than the in-state students (because of a limit on the number of out-of-staters admitted). Among this group, out-of-state women were the most qualified of all, because there were many more female applicants.
3) Of the remainder, many were from smaller Virginia communities (Richmond, Lynchburg, Staunton, etc.) and were from the more affluent families in those areas.
4) Because many more women than men applied to W & M, and they wanted to keep a gender balance, the women were much more qualified.
There were people of various races from each group.
The challenges between groups were intriguing. For example, the Northern Virginians suddenly were among people even better at school than they were (the out-of-staters). The smaller-city people were from less egalitarian areas, and came off as snobs to some of the others. The out-of-staters did not know the customs of Virginia, and sometimes were unintentionally rude. The best students and the student leaders were often women, and the men (especially from smaller towns in Virginia) were in some cases not used to that.
This diversity was a direct result of two kinds of affirmative action: That favoring Virginia residents (which disfavored me), and that favoring men (which benefitted me).
The results of this affirmative action mattered. It made all of us better. The Northern Virginians were made better students by the challenge of smart kids from Ohio and California and Maine. The out-of-staters learned the ways of a new culture. The smaller-town Virginians became more flexible socially. We all became comfortable with women as leaders in all types of positions.
I benefitted from that diversity, and I am still thankful for it. It made me a better student and a better person.
However, it was not, for the most part, the racial diversity, attained by affirmative action, that the Supreme Court is going to rule on this term, in a case out of the Univ. of Texas's law school. It was affirmative action that favored men and Virginians.
Is affirmative action worthwhile? Who benefits from it?
Comments:
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Well, I hope my post got posted! I chose Google Account and then it disappeared.
# posted by 
: 12:43 AM
: 12:43 AM
There is a difference between being accepted (offered a spot) and actually choosing to attend a school. Does the current policy apply in both areas or only in the admission phase? Curious???
Affirmative action is a blunt instrument which nevertheless has been effective, in my opinion, in bringing lots of people into the mainstream of American life, into undergraduate schools, graduate schools, and later jobs and neighborhoods where otherwise they would not have had access. It has helped to bring more of our citizens into the middle class or even higher.
I used to be in college admissions at a highly selective school, and I can tell you that admission to my school and others like it (the top 40 or 50 that everybody wants to get into) is at least 50 percent affirmative action to some group. Any admission process that isn't based solely on grades and test scores involves affirmative action in its broadest sense: bringing in groups of people otherwise under-represented on the college's campus. These could be athletes, children of alumni, kids with particular talents the university wants, kids from a state or country they've never had represented before, conservative students into a liberal-leaning student body, a young woman with magenta hair into a preppy school, young women into engineering programs . . . the list goes on, according to each institution's priorities.
Many students aspiring to college want diversity in their student body: they want to go to a school where not everybody is just like them. They usually want to go to a school that isn't an extension of high school, if they're able to go away to college. The colleges boasting students from all 50 states and 110 other countries are attractive to many applicants.
Admission officers at selective colleges are painstakingly crafting a group of students from diverse viewpoints, creating little utopias, social experiments, hothouses of mixing opinions where people are supposed to learn from each other. I think we as Americans have accepted this as what we often want in our colleges. Admissions officers faced with 35,000 applicants for 3,000 or 1,500 spots in the class have the luxury of crafting this kind of a class . . . We have accepted the American Dream as our value and loadstar in this country, and college campuses are the locus of that dream. Affirmative action now extends to low-income students, students whose parents didn't go to college. Colleges have tacitly taken the reins of this dream and use their entering class to try to raise up as many students as they can.
I have seen this from the inside (as an admission officer) and out (as a college counselor at an international high school now). While I am not certain I agree with the extent to which the most selective colleges choose their communities of students each year (I've lost the ability to predict anything at all), I generally believe that affirmative action that the Supreme Court is going to discuss has been beneficial. I hope there will be discussion of non-ethnicity types of affirmative action, as I've mentioned, because then the debate gets much wider.
I used to be in college admissions at a highly selective school, and I can tell you that admission to my school and others like it (the top 40 or 50 that everybody wants to get into) is at least 50 percent affirmative action to some group. Any admission process that isn't based solely on grades and test scores involves affirmative action in its broadest sense: bringing in groups of people otherwise under-represented on the college's campus. These could be athletes, children of alumni, kids with particular talents the university wants, kids from a state or country they've never had represented before, conservative students into a liberal-leaning student body, a young woman with magenta hair into a preppy school, young women into engineering programs . . . the list goes on, according to each institution's priorities.
Many students aspiring to college want diversity in their student body: they want to go to a school where not everybody is just like them. They usually want to go to a school that isn't an extension of high school, if they're able to go away to college. The colleges boasting students from all 50 states and 110 other countries are attractive to many applicants.
Admission officers at selective colleges are painstakingly crafting a group of students from diverse viewpoints, creating little utopias, social experiments, hothouses of mixing opinions where people are supposed to learn from each other. I think we as Americans have accepted this as what we often want in our colleges. Admissions officers faced with 35,000 applicants for 3,000 or 1,500 spots in the class have the luxury of crafting this kind of a class . . . We have accepted the American Dream as our value and loadstar in this country, and college campuses are the locus of that dream. Affirmative action now extends to low-income students, students whose parents didn't go to college. Colleges have tacitly taken the reins of this dream and use their entering class to try to raise up as many students as they can.
I have seen this from the inside (as an admission officer) and out (as a college counselor at an international high school now). While I am not certain I agree with the extent to which the most selective colleges choose their communities of students each year (I've lost the ability to predict anything at all), I generally believe that affirmative action that the Supreme Court is going to discuss has been beneficial. I hope there will be discussion of non-ethnicity types of affirmative action, as I've mentioned, because then the debate gets much wider.
# posted by : 9:28 AM
: 9:28 AM
Christine, I don't understand your question... the schools use affirmative action in choosing who to admit. What beyond that are you asking about?
Mark - I'm good! I was thinking that a person can be admitted but not enroll. So although the admissions office may admit a diverse group the challenge still exists to convince prospective students to enroll and make that diversity a reality.
Thank you Amy DC for your eloquent insider knowledge and explanation.
Thank you Amy DC for your eloquent insider knowledge and explanation.
To answer your question given the present format of Affirmative Action, my answer is nobody. Nobody benefits. Choosing people who look different is not diversity. Choosing people who have different life experiences, people who have learned different life lessons and have different ways of looking at the world is diversity. Where is the fairness in having Affirmative Action on the college application for a white kid of semi-illiterate parents, growing up doing all the homework on their own compared to a black kid of college educated parents? For most people academic achievement (not just here but anywhere in the world) is not a genetic trait, it is a deliberately cultivated state of mind and if there is to be a rubric to acknowledge a special effort it should be granted to those beating all odds to fulfill that state of mind. And even then, any kind of preferential treatment or quota fulfillment is a fine line to tread, not just from the academic integrity angle, but for the burden placed on those given the special acknowledgement.
To Christine: Yes, it's true that colleges still have to get kids to enroll (because most kids apply to 8 - 10 schools or even more). They spend lots of money and effort trying to convince all the students they've so carefully admitted that they should choose their college. They call it "yield," and it's why lots of them have (binding) Early Decision, so they can lock them in without having to do any convincing.
To Marta: In my experience, affirmative action started out as what you mention (letting one characteristic such as ethnicity be the deciding factor), and it may still happen in some situations.
But it's also my experience that affirmative action as you describe it has evolved to become the nuanced process that you also describe. Colleges are falling all over themselves to admit poor, smart kids who have raised themselves up by their bootstraps, because you're right, what the majority of colleges are concerned with is rewarding effort and smarts and overcoming difficulties. That is definitely the ethos in admissions offices. They proudly advertise the percentage of "first-generation college" students they admit, which sometimes corresponds to ethnicity and sometimes doesn't.
It's an evolving scenario, evolving as the population and economic situation and attitudes of our country evolve. What I think is fascinating--and quite difficult to quantify--is the notion of what US colleges are supposed to be and to do. That's really what "affirmative action" is about, as it relates to college admission. Somehow it was decided--by the courts, by public opinion and morality--that including race/ethnicity in admission 30 years ago was a way to right past wrongs; that colleges were one major place where this should happen. And I think, in many cases, it has worked.
To Marta: In my experience, affirmative action started out as what you mention (letting one characteristic such as ethnicity be the deciding factor), and it may still happen in some situations.
But it's also my experience that affirmative action as you describe it has evolved to become the nuanced process that you also describe. Colleges are falling all over themselves to admit poor, smart kids who have raised themselves up by their bootstraps, because you're right, what the majority of colleges are concerned with is rewarding effort and smarts and overcoming difficulties. That is definitely the ethos in admissions offices. They proudly advertise the percentage of "first-generation college" students they admit, which sometimes corresponds to ethnicity and sometimes doesn't.
It's an evolving scenario, evolving as the population and economic situation and attitudes of our country evolve. What I think is fascinating--and quite difficult to quantify--is the notion of what US colleges are supposed to be and to do. That's really what "affirmative action" is about, as it relates to college admission. Somehow it was decided--by the courts, by public opinion and morality--that including race/ethnicity in admission 30 years ago was a way to right past wrongs; that colleges were one major place where this should happen. And I think, in many cases, it has worked.
# posted by : 12:25 PM
: 12:25 PM
I can understand affirmative action in the regional sense for public schools who are getting money from the state to educate students from that state.
And while I appreciate diversity and understand the benefits, I can't help but feel jipped knowing that I can be just as qualified for something and yet be looked over simply because I'm white. This came to light for me when I began looking for scholarships and realized how a vast majority are catered to people of some type of minority.
And again, the next year when I applied to be an RA at my college and was told by a staff member that one of the reasons I could have been turned down was because they want to have diversity. I would have taken that lightly, until I thought more about it. Out of my three friends and I who applied, only one was offered a spot and she was the only minority. (To be fair, I know I'm not perfect and there could have been other reasons as well. One of my white friends though ended up being an awesome RA but was put on the wait list)
I guess the bottom line for me is that it just doesn't seem fair. We've just tipped the scale to the other side instead of making it equal.
And while I appreciate diversity and understand the benefits, I can't help but feel jipped knowing that I can be just as qualified for something and yet be looked over simply because I'm white. This came to light for me when I began looking for scholarships and realized how a vast majority are catered to people of some type of minority.
And again, the next year when I applied to be an RA at my college and was told by a staff member that one of the reasons I could have been turned down was because they want to have diversity. I would have taken that lightly, until I thought more about it. Out of my three friends and I who applied, only one was offered a spot and she was the only minority. (To be fair, I know I'm not perfect and there could have been other reasons as well. One of my white friends though ended up being an awesome RA but was put on the wait list)
I guess the bottom line for me is that it just doesn't seem fair. We've just tipped the scale to the other side instead of making it equal.
# posted by : 12:40 PM
: 12:40 PM
Oh what a pleasure to read and enjoy a wonderful discussion!
Thank you all and a special thank you to Amy DC for inviting me into an 'admissions office and it's deliberating process' through your words - I can almost see, through their eyes, the hopes and dreams of the applicants as they await admission letters...
Thank you all and a special thank you to Amy DC for inviting me into an 'admissions office and it's deliberating process' through your words - I can almost see, through their eyes, the hopes and dreams of the applicants as they await admission letters...
# posted by : 9:18 AM
: 9:18 AM
One unintended consequence of affirmative action has been the automatic assumption that any minority got in not because they were qualified, but because of their race, financial status or gender. This has hurt many very qualified professionals who didn't 'check the box'.
It has also hurt the financial status of many schools - they offer so much aid to the disadvantaged that the middle class families are priced out of the equation.
Lee
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It has also hurt the financial status of many schools - they offer so much aid to the disadvantaged that the middle class families are priced out of the equation.
Lee
# posted by : 2:40 PM
: 2:40 PM << Home
