Affirmative Action!!! Guilty?

Applying to College
1

<p>I was wondering if I should feel guilty IF i get into MIT even tho my stats are not as high nor as impressive as others who are denied entrance. I would probably be accepted only through affrimative action. Therefore since I do not seem to have as high of SAT scores nor created magnificent research or community involvement as those others who are in the applicant pool. </p>

<p>Should I feel guilty that just because of my race I was picked over someone else? How about other African Americans who are accepted over others because of thier race?
Would you still apply or attend a school if you knew it was only b/c of your race that you were accepted.</p>

2

<p>Very loaded question.</p>

<p>Look at it this way, there is a very very high probability that there were African-Americans with higher stats than you that were rejected (we are assuming you got in) and white students with lower stats than you who were accepted. </p>

<p>Unless for some bizzare you are the least qualified person who is accepted into MIT, then you weren’t accepted “only b/c of your race.”</p>

3

<p>I agree with Just_Browsing, don’t feel guilty.</p>

4

<p>Should I feel guilty about having affirmative action boost me above others who are more accomplished than me?</p>

<p>IF I Get into MIT.</p>

5

<p>“should i feel…”
it’s not really possible to control how you feel
The choice isn’t how you feel, it’s whether or not you accept it and go to the school</p>

<p>Read <b>The Hunger of Memory</b> by Richard Rodriguez</p>

<p>There’s a reason why some states outlawed affirmative action</p>

<p>but personally, it’s your education, you worked hard, you want to go there, so hey! good for you</p>

6

<p>MIT won’t take you unless you’re qualified, so you have nothing to feel guilty about. While it’s true that many qualified applicants get turned away, there is no one litmus test for which of the qualified applicants is more or less deserving. And if there were, it sure wouldn’t be the SAT. MIT is smart enough to know that the SAT has limited predictive validity for how well a person will do in college.</p>

<p>One thing MIT does (as do most schools, or so they say), is to try to evaluate the students’ accomplishments in light of his or her opportunities. Ethnicity aside, a student from a state with a historically poor educational system (like many states in the South, where you say you’re from) who has done well enough to qualify for MIT…that says a lot about the individual student and what his potential might be in a place like MIT. </p>

<p>To use a metaphor, suppose we wanted to decide who the better money manager was. At the end of a year, person A has $10,000 and person B has $20,000. It looks like person B is the better manager, till you consider that person A started with $1 and person B started with $25,000. Colleges like MIT try to look at who has done the most with what they had. </p>

<p>It may be that people you know who apply to MIT and don’t get in might try to make you feel guilty if you do. That says more about them then it does about you, and you aren’t responsible for their perception of what happened. A lot of people respond to disappointment by trying to oversimplify and blame. I can promise you, if they don’t have your URM status to use an excuse, it will be something else. (I’ve seen white kids do the same thing to each other, “You only got in because of …”). It’s part of human nature; the best you can do is try to understand where they are coming from and not take it too personally.</p>

<p>And if you get the opportunity to go to MIT, do your best; that way you’ll never have any regrets!</p>

7

<p>Why should you feel guilty? It’s the admission officers who made the decision. Are you feeling guilty about how your competitors weren’t born with darker skin tones? Because that’s ridiculous. Even if you were chosen “solely due to race,” you should only feel guilty if you flounder and do badly. If you do well, then what guilt is there?</p>

8

<p>I guess its settled then: since URMs are now being evaluated on “the students’ accomplishments in light of his or her opportunities.”, then obviously black kids from upper middle class and wealthy families or the same kids who graduate from top rated private secondary schools - won’t get any extra points anymore when applying to MIT and other top schools like Harvard</p>

9

<p>Citation, there’s a move afoot to look at socioeconomic status as much or more than ethnicity, and some schools already do so. They also look at geographic residence, the quality of the school attended, and other issues that affect access to opportunties. But ethnicity will probably still be considered for URMs because, even when they have access to opportunities, there is often institutionalized racism within those opportunities that they have to overcome. </p>

<p>Who wins awards, what grades you get on assignments, who gets the best recommendation letters, etc., can be very subjective, and influenced by all sorts of factors. For example, it’s been shown that men rate women’s math papers a whole point lower than if they think the paper is done by a man. When my neice (who is white BTW, as am I) began attending an elite private school on scholarship in 4th grade, several of the teachers and parents made a big deal about how they didn’t want a “public school kid” in their midst, and she was treated badly in the classroom the first couple of years. Imagine how much worse it would have been had she been a URM. </p>

<p>If not for these types of efforts, unconcious prejudice would probably cause qualified candidates to be turned away by colleges for no reason other than stereotypes. Once when my D. was visiting a college (Summer of 2000), she was told by an adcom that “being from Louisiana doesn’t mean that you won’t get in, but you’ll have to work a lot harder. Try to win a national championship in something.” The adcoms’ point was that coming from Louisiana, a state with historically poor schools, anything she accomplished was suspect unless it got external validation.</p>

<p>I hope you will try to keep an open mind about affirmative action. Neither of us is in a position to dictate to Harvard or MIT how to run their schools–unless you’ve donated a building or something and forgotten to mention it.</p>

10

<p>My mother ALWAYS says the only reason she got into Haas (UCB) right after college was because she was Hispanic.
She dosn’t feel guilty because she deserved it just as much as the other appilcants and has obviously put it to good use.
If you’re trying to get into MIT and you know you have lower GPAs and SAT scores than all the other white kids and just because youre AA you’re going to get in then that might be something to think about.
If you have the same stats as a qualified applicant then the AA thing is just a plus.
Good luck at applying to MIT</p>

11

<p>Race based discrimination has been unconstitutional under equal protection grounds for many decades in the United States - and it doesn’t matter whether a college labels it under another name such as “socioeconomic status” (the latest gimmick) - any college that continues these de facto racial quotas - will eventually run into serious problems </p>

<p>In contrast discrimination under characteristics such as geographic locale, legacy, athletic ability, musical talent, or even gender (in certain cases) - has no comparable constitutional protection</p>

<p>As for “unconscious prejudice” I suppose that is why several decades back CALIFORNIA tried to remedy the ultra-low black bar passage rate -by awarding extra points for black bar applicants, with the ultimate result; that there would be in effect two bar exams: one for blacks or other “hardship” groups and a regular exam for everyone else</p>

<p>Strangely enough it was the various black atty bar associations that stopped this idea -lest they be stigmatized as passing the bar NOT on the merits but instead because of the color of their skin</p>

<p>The pro-affirmative action zealots have now in effect created a permanent underclass of graduates of top schools - where it will be presumed (sometimes unfairly of course) - that a person’s color was the ultimate or major factor allowing them admission to that institution </p>

<p>Of course the tired refrain always will be “they were qualified” which of course is meaningless since the most elite schools reject huge quantities of “qualified” applicants every single year</p>

12

<p>No, you shouldn’t. You did not choose Affirmative Action, Affirmative Action chose you.</p>

13

<p>Citation X, using SES is hardly a gimmick, unless you assume that only URMs can be poor, and that poverty has no effect on one’s opportunities for education.</p>

<p>And I doubt that anyone but you perceives URM graduates of places like Harvard, Yale, MIT, Stanford, etc., as inferior.</p>

14

<p>I don’t think anybody perceives URMs from top colleges to be NECESSASARILY inferior. It’s like how you’d see a football/basketball player of ANY race from Michigan, Notre Dame, Duke, or Vanderbilt: MAYBE they would have gotten in without their athletic abiltiy, OR maybe they would’ve been laughed at by the admissions office without their athletic abiltiy. So it’s not like you’d necessarily perceive them as inferior; it’s just that you wouldn’t NECESSASARILY perceive them as on par with the majority of the graduates. Once you see the slack these jocks are given with admissions, the easy courses they are steered towards, and the extra assistance they get in studying, you would have to be insanely illogical to think otherwise. On another thread someone cited the average SAT scores for recent classes of Duke basketball players, and it was shockingly low. I doubt that the average SATs for URM students are as drastically different from the non-URMs as the basketball/football jocks’ are from non-jocks’ scores, but the same principle applies.</p>

<p>When I was at Boston College a long time ago, I took a School of Education course that had 2 white football players in it. The class was primarily geared towards elementary school lesson plans–hardly rocket science–yet these two guys clearly didn’t have a clue what was going on, and even tried to get me to do their homework for them (I was the only other male in the class). What’s really sad is that they were about 4th string on the football team, so it’s not like they were going to make a living playing football.</p>

15

<p>The “socioeconomic” construct (itself created in contemplation unfavorable court decisions) which the elite colleges are now pushing has a number of serious problems:</p>

<ol>
<li><p>it is well known the majority of black acceptees (and Hispanic) under affirmative action programs at the top colleges over the past several decades have arrived from middle class or often substantially more affluent family backgrounds</p>

<ol>
<li>A program that is (purportedly) designed to discriminate in favor of (lower) socioeconomic class applicants, will of course have to include large number of poor whites and poor Asians with SAT scores far below the median, something the same colleges have shown no sign of a willingness to undertake.</li>
<li>Colleges who now worship at the shine of diversity, strangely enough are quite willing to group nearly all Asians together - so that male upper middle class male from Chicago is deemed “underrepresented” yet for example a 1st generation student from Tibet now living in America who was once raised by Tibetan monks is simply another (over represented) Asian</li>
</ol></li>
</ol>

16

<ol>
<li><p>where are the statistics to backup that claim? I’d argue that only the “better-off” minorities are aware that they have a shot at the better schools, so of course more middle class minorities would be a part of the accepted pool. Just like more middle class and affluent WHITE kids are present in the accepted pool than poor ones. It is not affirmative action necessarily that CAUSES the fact that you mention…it is, I would argue, influenced by socioeconomic status that limits the pool of applicants, WHITE or MINORITY, at least according to a good number of top-20 college and university presidents.</p></li>
<li><p>Actually, it is untrue that colleges have admissions programs that favors lower-socioeconomic applicants. But, schools are moving towards holistic reviews because it is difficult to compare socioeconomically disadvantaged students with affluent kids who have more resources at their disposal. Such kadantaged kids, it is asumed, will have taken the opportunity of the “leg-up” that wealth provides. Since there are also those in the applicant pool, who do not come from that kind of background, it would be unfair to compare based just on data. The socioeconomically disadvantaged kid may have blossomed if given the opportunities money could provide, but did not have the option–whether it is where they go to school (no matter the quality) or the resources available to them. As to willingness of schools to include less socioeconomically advantaged kids…that is not the cases as, for example, impoverished Southeast Asian applicants are treated differently than those of Japanese, Chinese, or Korean applicants that tend to come from a different background. Schools like Harvard, UPenn, Yale, UNC, UVA, etc…have been tweaking their ADMISSIONS and FINANCIAL AID formulas to erase the HISTORIC trend of DISCRIMINATING AGAINST those who did not grow up in affluent homes, benefit from private or suburban school systems, etc… The problem is the affluent applicants do not want a change in policy because it affects their own chances at the better colleges. I should know, I went to a private HS, and my parents are affluent. I know about attitudes held by my peer group. I’m also part-Asian and part-White.</p></li>
<li><p>See above. Adcoms would make distinctions between the two candidates , if the former is, say, Chinese, and the latter is Tibetian. In any case, both are still underrepresented at a good number of private schools–although that is slowly changing.</p></li>
</ol>

17

<p>To get back to the OP’s question: no, you shouldn’t feel guilty about going to MIT as an Affirmative Action applicant. Even though I see lots of flaws with Affirmative Action, the admissions rulebook at most colleges right now includes it, so you’re just making the most of an imperfect regulation. But realistically, you can probably expect to have some people being skeptical about your degree the rest of your life.</p>

18

<p>^ And that will say more about them, then it will about the OP.</p>

<p>The other reason not to feel guilty is simple: colleges do affirmative action for URMS for the same reason they do it for athletes: because they believe it adds value to their campuses. And in the case of URMs, having minority students on campus participating in discussions enhances the education that the school is able to provide.</p>

<p>I read an article once about a class discussion at an elite U. The question was: why are people enlisting to fight in the Iraq war? Every student who spoke talked about values like patriotism. Not one brought up the considerable economic pressure that can drive enlistment. It never occured to them, because none of them would need to join the military to pay for college or to earn a living wage. The absence of that perspective made everyone in the room dumber than they needed to be.</p>

<p>Institutions of higher learning, especially elite institutions, are supposed to be able to turn out people who can make public policy, corporate policy, research decisions, etc. If they are never exposed to anything outside their own experience, they won’t be able to do that. Not because they intend to leave people out, but because people will be invisible to them. </p>

<p>Think it doesn’t matter to someone pursuing an engineering degree? Think again. Remember first generation airbags and all the women and children who died in low speed crashes when their airbags decapitated them? Trouble was, the researchers who tested the airbags were acting on the assumption that the standard human being was an adult male, and anything that worked for them would work for anyone else. They never tested airbags on crash test dummies that resembled women (who tend to have smaller stature then men) and children, and, until the bodies started piling up, didn’t think to warn the public that only men’s typical stature had been considered.</p>

<p>It’s not just crash test dummies that create life or death issues; different medications affect different genders and ethnicities differently; different populations are more or less susceptible to different diseases; even the normal range of medical tests may vary by gender and ethnicity. For decades, there was little or no research on issues that didn’t affect white men or consideration that standard medical treatments (like aspirin to prevent heart attacks) might not work on other populations as well as on white men. I personally lost a good friend (black) at 42 to a heart attack, and had another friend (white) permanently disabled from heart failure at 41. Both had sought medical attention repeatedly and had their cardiac symptoms dismissed (respectively) as panic attacks and muscle strain. They would both be here and healthy if their doctors had stopped to consider that heart failure presents differently in women than in men, and ordered something as simple as an EKG.</p>

<p>But if I’m not in the room with you when you’re getting your education, how are you going to think about me later?</p>

19

<p>“I would probably be accepted only through affrimative action. Therefore since I do not seem to have as high of SAT scores nor created magnificent research or community involvement as those others who are in the applicant pool.”</p>

<p>-I doubt you, or anyone else, would be accepted if this were true. Colleges don’t admit people based just on race, and despite what the AA critics like to assert, aren’t picking URMs with scores that are significantly worse than their non-URM counterparts. Admissions rates for Black students at most elite schools are usually only slightly higher than that of the general pool. In fact, for many schools, the Black admissions rate is actually LOWER than the general population.</p>

<p>“Should I feel guilty that just because of my race I was picked over someone else?”</p>

<p>-You would not be accepted over anyone else. It is the SCHOOL which decides who deserves admission, not people who have inflated senses of entitlement. If the school wanted others and not you, believe me they would have been accepted. No student should be apologetic for a decision that his/her college makes. Like I have said before, If college admissions were all about numbers, then schools would just release their minimum standards and only allow students who met said standards to apply. Moreover, all schools would accept their classes on a rolling basis, as only numbers would be looked at.</p>

<p>I’d invite anyone who has any more pro/con arguments of Affirmative Action first to search for the thread: “Affirmative Action Ethics”. There is a substantial amount of information therein, and people should read before they make any more claims for or against the program.</p>

20

<p>Glad to hear they are tweaking it a bit for asians - my impression is that in general they being discriminated against and I believe this bias was established at U CAL Berkely and other CAL public universities a few years back</p>

<p>No doubt middle class people of ANY color would have better information about admissions and exams and that itself might boost applicants, but it sort of defeats much of the “diversity” argument that colleges talk so much about</p>