fgalkin wrote:And this proves that affirmative action programs favor people who are not qualified to go to that college over students who are qualified, but happen to be not a minority.
Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin
Problems with this statement:
It assumes that there is a single standard for being "qualified" to attend college. Test scores, such as the SAT, predicts 22% of the variance in freshman grades (source: The National Center for Fair and Open Testing); when compared to the cumulative college experience, SAT scores account for only 4% of the variance in grades (same souce). SATs often roughly the same value for predicitions as looking at the education of a potential student's parents (Bowen and Vars, The Black-White Test Score Gap, 1998). Women typically score lower on the SAT than men (on average, 35-40 points) despite the fact that women typically do better in high school and college (source: National Center for Fair and Open Testing). For minorities, the same is true (source: Bowen and Bok, The Shape of the River, 1998). This means that the standard American measure of "qualification" or "merit" is fundamentally flawed.
Moreover, white (and, ostensibly, Asian) students tend to have advantages in education prior to college; poor public schools tend to be overwhelmingly black. Therefore, to ensure equality of opportunity amongst students with roughly equal innate talents.
Make no mistake - we are talking about roughly equal talents here. Minority students accepted to highly selective institutions on affirmative action programs graduate more often than their counterparts at less selective insitutions (source: Bowen and Bok, The Shape of the River).
So what about grades? Texas implemented the the 10% plan, where students in the top 10% of their class in high school are guaranteed acceptance into the state universities. This doesn't work; it is predicated on the assumption that high schools are segregated, and it increases the drop-out rate for minority students. Moreover, it reduces the number of qualified students, minorities or otherwise, who get into college. Finally, without race-based scholarships to match, the students who would benefit from these programs cannot do so, as they simply cannot afford to go to school (sources: Bowen and Bok; Plous, S. - "Ten Myths About Affirmative Education" from the Journal of Social Issues)
Finally, without affirmative action programs like race-based scholarships, the enrollment of blacks at selective universities would drop to about 2% (Bowen and Bok), perpetuating the problems of racial inequality that affirmative action works to remedy.
With regards to class-based scholarships: According to Thomas Kane, "among all students from families with incomes under $20,000 who also finished in the top tenth of their high school class, only one in six is black or Hispanic." The number of poor minorities who succeed in school is very low; giving scholarships based on class results in a lack in racial diversity.