The other Supreme Court decision was concerning university
affirmative action admission policies.
This is an issue I have blogged on numerous occasions and it
is not over because a Michigan case is winding its way to the Supreme Court
next year.
Many people are confused by this issue because it is so
complicatedly “stupid”. Race is not an issue in college attendance; no one is
barred from attending college because of their race or skin color.
Many African-Americans attend colleges or universities as do
American Indians, Asians, Chinese, etc. with no problems at all.
So what is all this about? Well it is about “elite” schools
like the University of Michigan and as in the Supreme Court case, the
University of Texas. Since many people want to attend these “elite” schools,
the schools have “admission policies” that weed out or filter the applying
students to get only the best students BUT since these “elite” schools also
want a “diversified student population” they allow not only the best but
students that are not the best but they are African-Americans.
The question people usually have is why is it important to
have a diversified student population? Obviously, the universities feel that
there is an “educational” benefit to having a diversified student population. I
can kind of agree with that since I believe your learning environment should
resemble the real world.
The problem is that to get that diversified student body,
the university has to replace some of the “best” with African-Americans who are
not some of the “best” and therefore white students that are the “best” but are
not admitted feel they are being discriminated against because they are white
and that is the case the Supreme Court just decided; the case was brought by a
white, female student that did not make it into the University of Texas.
Note: The problem
with admitting a student that is not the “best” but rather far from being the
best basically guarantees that the student that was admitted based on color,
will drop out quickly and data supports that fact so we are arguing about a
concept that really does no good to the people that are admitted based on race.
Note: I have always
maintained that helping poor students enter “elite” schools is a noble gesture,
especially if they are poor but smart. Schools have scholarship programs but I
guess we are talking about poor people that are not so smart and would not be
able to compete for actual scholarships.
OK so what are we trying to achieve here? We want a diverse
student population because that has educational or sociological value to the
entire student population but admitting African-Americans just for diversity
reasons has not statistically, benefitted those African-Americans because most
of them drop out because they are out of their league academically.
The Supreme Court said in a 7-1 decision (Ginsberg dissented)
sent the case back to the lower court with the proviso that the lower court
make sure that the admissions policy has absolutely no other way of
diversifying the student population without resorting to racial quotas.
That decision says that yes, you can use affirmative action
to diversify the student population but you must have a damn good rationale for
doing so.
Both sides claim victory but we will have to wait to see how
this decision unpacks in the real world.
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