AFFIRMATIVE ACTION IN COLLEGE ADMISSIONS

Within the term "affirmative action" lies the word 'action'. Action is not passive. To take action means actually doing something to make a change rather than doing nothing and waiting for a change to happen. In terms of making colleges more diverse, affirmative action means they cannot just keep admitting people based on the typical GPA and test scores and hope it will enable a diverse campus. Race needs to be considered in the admissions process. Affirmative action needs to be interpreted as colleges taking action to make sure there are admitted students of all races. Colleges bending their standards to let in a wide variety of races is what is needed because it is the most effective way for colleges to withhold diversity within their campus.

Going past the interpretation of the literal term "affirmative action", there are plenty of reasons why colleges need diversity within their students. In Tim Wise's White Like Me he talks about the inequities between whites and blacks. He says, "If you conclude that the problem is with the system, then you are compelled, as a fair-minded person, to do something about it" (p.64). He is saying it's fine if you think as a race they are culturally less inclined to excel in education, but then as a good person you should also want to change that. That's where affirmative action comes in. If blacks know that colleges want people of their race, then they might not feel hopeless when it comes to college. If they knew they weren't only being compared to the grades of all the other applicants some with better educations, but their race and background educations would also be considered in the process, then the cycle could stop. More black people could get into college, maybe less qualified then someone else with a better background, but now if they work hard they can build a quality life for themselves. Their children and the future of their race will now grow up with a better education and you will see the inequalities between the races go away. So that maybe in 20 years colleges will be able to exclude race from admissions and truly judge every applicant equally since the top students would now be from a variety of races: white, black, Hispanic, etc. This will only be the case if the cycle is broken, and as mentioned before affirmative action can be a solution.

I also want to clear up one more thing. I've heard people say, "What about those black colleges? They can have those but we can't be fine with our colleges being mostly white?" Maybe they're referring to Howard University or maybe they're referring to a different black college. Either way there's a difference between black colleges and the idea of white colleges. Mainly because there's one significant different between the two races. Whites are a majority and blacks are a minority. A majority race having an institution in society with bias is threatening to those minorities because in being a minority you automatically have less power than majorities just by population size alone. However a minority having an institution bias to the majority is no real threat to the majority because a minority of the population that is also a minority in government power cannot possibly ever be a threat to the majority.