Affirmative Action - am I just not getting it?

[wolveraptor]

The difference, however, is that nobody can look at you and tell that you grew up poor. The challenges you may have faced as a youth do not dog you forever in life. A shower, a haircut, and some decent clothes, and you can no longer tell the difference. Meanwhile, a black man can overcome challenge after challenge after challenge in life, and yet he can still walk into a job interview and the interviewer can think "oh, a nigger".

That's not true. He can pull a Michael Jackson-esque surgery job, and no one will be the wiser. Though then they might discriminate against him on the basis of whether he's of the human race or not.

In seriousness, though, my affirmative action idea for the poor was not to counteract discrimination, but rather the fact that they may have lower grades merely because of problems with the only highschool they could afford. Meaning that you're right, it should have limited applicability. A poor white man shouldn't need affirmative action when going for a job interview, just for college application.

[Lusankya]

In Australia they have some medical places made available for rural students, although I believe this is mainly to counteract the shortage of rural doctors. Students originally from rural areas are more likely to practise in rural areas when they graduate (and will possibly stay for longer as well). My dad practised anaesthetics in a rural town for a while, but when my sisters reached high-school age, he returned to Adelaide. Quite a few other doctors in the area had children within a few years of us, so the town lost about half its doctors within the space of a few years because none of the doctors had any real loyalty to the town.

A similar reason exists for wanting more aboriginal doctors as well: aborigines, especially from more remote areas, are more likely to feel comfortable with a doctor of their own race. Given the crappy state of aboriginal health, anything to make healthcare more accessible to aborigines is a step in the right direction.

Of course, in general, education opportunities and socio-economic status are what counts when going for university, and not race (even in my example it's the country's actual needs, rather than anything else per se), however if the application is to be made on SES, then that opens up areas for people to cheat. It's much easier to pretend that your parents earn $10k less than they actually do than to pretend that you're a different race. If the budget for AA remains the same, but AA is expanded to include all poor, then it's possible that increased policing costs will result in the AA doing less good to disadvantaged students overall.


ROAR!!!!! says GOJIRA!!!!!