<p>Regarding the matter of minority undergraduate qualifications & AA:</p>
<p>There have been articles cited in threads dealing with this topic on CC, including recently, directly addressing the myth of alleged underqualification of minorities in <em>freshman</em> admission. Again, do your own research.</p>
<p>Poiuyt:
“If society as a whole decides that some sacrifice from the other ethnic groups is in order for the greater good, we should be all for it, including Asian-Americans.”</p>
<p>Didn’t Hitler say the same thing, except he replaced the word Asian-American with Jews?</p>
<p>The above quote is by far the most racist and insensitive sentence I have ever read at CC. So you just decided that to do some good, you “sacrifice” another? Asian doesn’t have a freedom to not be used for whatever “greater good” you are alluding to. On the same line of logic, why don’t we just get rid of admission procedure altogether and eliminate tuition too. Anyone who want to go to college can just show up at any school and enroll without question. It certainly “benefits” society with the colleges paying the price, but it’s for the greater good right? And it’s only a few hundreds colleges that will be affected by this, but “we should be all for it” including the colleges.</p>
<p>Better yet, let bring back slavery. Sure, it sucks for a certain ethnic group, but imagine the economic savings and productivity. Let pick the smallest ethnic group, because there are too few of them to resist. And once they see the benefits their labor brings to society they would surely agree to it.</p>
<p>While there should be more diversity, it’s precisely the mentality of encouraging people to use the past or circumstances as a crutch rather than taking charge of their own lives that makes things worse. Merely having the name of a top college won’t do much good if it means that other people are always questioning whether you earned it. Colleges could care less about actually helping other races to succeed in a real way as long as they give the appearance that they’re not being discrimatory by filling quotas. That’s why making fun of Asians is acceptable, because they can get away with it. It’s all just a PR campaign. The fact that Asians tend to do well academically has little to do with historical events in the past and more to do with cultural expections. Most American students just don’t consider it a virtue to be be academically talented, and would rather excel in other areas like business or sports. Even top colleges have adopted the attitude that being good academically is synonymous with being dull and one-dimensional, which is why they would rather admit someone with strong ECs and relatively weak academics than the other way around. If parents of white and black students forced them to study all day, Asians probably would certainly not make up such a large percentage of the students with good academics.</p>
<p>“This could not be more true for police work, which demands for effectiveness direct and daily interface with a diverse community. A local police force needs to understand the language of the community, literally and figuratively, and to be able to “dwell” (sometimes on and off duty) in areas affected by crime and/or producing crime.”</p>
<p>Gee, what would I rather want:</p>
<p>1.) A bilingual cop who barely passed the exam and barely knows how to use a gun.</p>
<p>or:</p>
<p>2.) A cop who may only speak English but can do his job effectively.</p>
<p>I’ll take the latter. I’m sure that a less qualified URM took my cousin’s potential job. URMs aren’t hired by the police department to be “bilingual.” They are hired to try and recruit more URMs since their is a paucity of them in law enforcement, just as their is in colleges. So what does the police department do? The same thing that colleges do: lower the standards for URMs and cut down on the number of whites, despite the fact that many of these whites may be more qualified. Instead of trying to advertise for URMs and encourage them to try out fir the police department, the police department simply makes it easier for them to get jobs at the expense of whites. They are allowed to “cut in line.” Believe it or not, the police department’s promotion and hiring policies is very similar to college admissions. AA has tarnished both.</p>
<p>“While there should be more diversity, it’s precisely the mentality of encouraging people to use the past or circumstances as a crutch rather than taking charge of their own lives that makes things worse.”</p>
<p>Yes, which is why AA is so wrong. It continues to allown URMs to play the past racial discrimination card to get ahead. We should be advocating self-help and hard work in the URM communities to get into colleges and get jobs. This was Giuliani’s philosophy and it worked wonderfully. If anyone doesn’t believe me, comapre the NYC of the 80s and early 90s to NYC today and look at how it has improved (which is one of the reasons why NYU is so popular now).</p>
<p>
Suits me. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>"Most American students just don’t consider it a virtue to be be academically talented, and would rather excel in other areas like business or sports. "</p>
<p>No question. That’s why the Elites turn away 2 full and 3 full classes of qualified classes of <em>Americans</em> every year, with greater & greater academic credentials every year – so much so that the level of <em>over</em>-achievement has become a concern among colleges, parents, psychotherapists, society at large.</p>
<p>Yep. Those lazy American students.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I too find that to be a sweeping and over-generalized statement, as with this statement by the same poster:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>So “American” (which I disturbingly presume you mean “white”) students smoke cigars and play pool all day, while Asian (who I suppose, in your opinion, are not Americans) kids are locked in the attic to study all day.</p>
<p>“So “American” (which I disturbingly presume you mean “white”) students smoke cigars and play pool all day, while Asian (who I suppose, in your opinion, are not Americans) kids are locked in the attic to study all day.”</p>
<p>No, but Asian students are leading the charge academically, which is why there is such a large % of them at the top schools. Guess what? That % would be even greater if AA wasn’t in place.</p>
<p>Define “leading the charge academically.”</p>
<p>(If you mean that any individual Asian student is all-around more “academic” than any of their non-URM and URM counterparts, there is no evidence of that… including SAT scores, because such scores do not necessarily define “academic” in the eyes of <em>admissions</em> officers – regardless of how an SAT score may be viewed by any CC poster. </p>
<p>OTOH, if you mean that among the Asian student high school population, a majority of those are academically inclined & have a strong work ethic relative to academics, than yes.)</p>
<p>Drosselmeier,</p>
<p>In the long run, your system potentially resegregates America. You’re in fact stating that race is so important that it should never be ignored. You’re saying that we should treat people of different races differently because it’s a good thing to do.</p>
<p>Would you have dared to say that four decades ago? Unfortunately, one of the failures of the Civil Rights Movement is the legitimization of such thoughts. We’ve moved one step backward.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>That says it all. You want to be treated differently just because you’re Black. You want to “get even.” How does this actually help disadvantaged Americans? Answer - it doesn’t. Not one farthing.</p>
<p>IsleBoy,</p>
<p>It does not matter which group bears the greatest burden. What matters is affirmative action continues unequal treatment.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>The only way Asians can be seen as individuals is if their race is counted neither for them nor against them. Obviously, the student who was pegged as a “textureless math grind” was not seen as an individual (he applied to a “holistic” school, by the way). He was seen as fitting a racial stereotype.</p>
<p>It’s interesting that you believe requesting a fair deal is the same thing as “stacking the deck.” I never knew that treating people equally was the same as cheating in Poker.</p>
<p>“If you mean that any individual Asian student is all-around more “academic” than any of their non-URM and URM counterparts, there is no evidence of that”</p>
<p>Oh really. Why then is America 5% Asian, yet Asians constitute 15-20% of the collegiate population? And that’s with AA. Without it, this % would be even higher. Look at the non-AA UC system. The majority of the schools in it are over 40% Asian. Asians are overrepresented at colleges because they are “owning” the rest of us academically. This does not mean that they’re aren’t smart whites or URMs. As a whole though, Asians are excelling the most academically.</p>
<p>How can we ensure that the rest of the population, particularly the URMs, can compete with Asians? AA isn’t the answer. It isn’t boosting academic performance in the URM community. It merely makes it easier for them to get by. How is this going to do any good? Why don’t we focus more on encouraging academic excellence in URM community instead of using AA, an outdated, corrupt system to give URMs a “shortcut” to the top? If URM academic performance increased, their representation at colleges would increase as a result of their own hard work, not because of a race-based handout system like AA.</p>
<p>I agree. It seems that for the past few years there is an excess of preferential treatment for underepresented minorities rather than too little, depending on where you live. The problem isn’t AA itself, but the way it’s implemented. It’s much better to increase the performance of minorities, rather than simply establishing quotas to make a college look more “diverse”. Also that the race card is so often overplayed and abused, such as accusations of racism every time a black person doesn’t get treated favorably. I don’t think someone should get off more easily for doing something bad just because of race. Many of today’s youth don’t really understand what real racism was like. Why is it that today’s youth glorify racial slurs and stereotypes in their music and speech, and then complain about how unfair the system is. If someone wants to be held to a lower standard because of their race, they’re insulting themselves and their race more than getting revenge.</p>
<p>“If you mean that any individual Asian student is all-around more “academic” than any of their non-URM and URM counterparts, there is no evidence of that”</p>
<p>Oh really."</p>
<p>Yes really.</p>
<p>“As a whole though, Asians are excelling the most academically.”</p>
<p>Again untrue.</p>
<p>Some of you need to get over your superiority complex. Not even mostly because it’s unattractive. More because it shows how uninformed & superficial your knowledge base is.</p>
<p>“Without {AA} this % would be even higher.”</p>
<p>And without SAT scores, this % would be even lower.</p>
<p>“And without SAT scores, this % would be even lower.”</p>
<p>Oh so eliminating the SAT instead of AA is your great solution. First of all, the ACT is an option. Secondly, how are you supposed to effectively compare schools without the SAT/ACT? Neither test is perfect, but are the only way to truly compare applicants from different schools. Some schools use a 4.0 system. Others grade on a 100-point scale. There are even variations within these scales. The SAT and other standardized tests like it smooth out these variations since every student takes the same exam. While one student could attend a more competitive school than another, no student can say that his/her SAT was harder or easier than another student’s</p>
<p>“More because it shows how uninformed & superficial your knowledge base is.”</p>
<p>I find it a bit ironic that you question my knowledge when you have thus far show little proof to support your own. You haven’t show me a statistic that supports your point. Your argument has been purely ad hominem and has contained personal attacks like the one quoted above. It is amazing how this debate is playing out exacly like the earlier one in the parents forum. The pro-AA people talk and talk, yet provide no statistical proof to support themsleves beyond a flawed study which focused only on UC law school instead of the entire UC system. That’s because there is none. You can’t disprove the UC statistics or the unfair advantage given to URMs in admissions.</p>
<p>I’m saying that AA only <em>potentially</em> “favors” a URM once a qualified pool has been determined. You are not favored, preferred, or excused if you are a URM who cannot qualify academically for an Elite U. Once you’re within the pool based on your academic qualifications, what AA “gives” you is a close comparison as to whether you will truly bring something valuable to the U in addition to your racial representation. There are URM’s who are super-achievers who have nevertheless (& quite recently) been denied admission at top U’s. AA guarantees nothing to a URM.</p>
<p>I never said do away with scores. And yes, a standardized test can be one of many measuring sticks across different academic opportunities. However, even that in itself tells only part of the picture. Many schools integrate SAT prep within the curriculum; other schools, by virtue of their generally rigorous academic standards, make it more possible for their students to excel on those standardized tests. Even a non-URM student who goes to a school lacking in both of these advantages will therefore be disadvantaged by the test. That’s why the SAT and the ACT are overestimated as levellers. They are not really, & the colleges have come to see that as well. That is why colleges are less & less relying on any standardized tests as measurements of intellectual promise.</p>
<p>Hepstar, you are just blatantly ignorant on the current reality of AA: what it does & doesn’t supposedly “promise,” what it does & doesn’t excuse, promote, forgive, etc.</p>
<p>And yes, your broad statements are not based on current admissions realities. Not in the slightest. You promote ignorance on this board by continuing to state inaccuracies. That’s not an ad hominem attack. It’s a statement against the promotion of ignorance.</p>
<p>However, many people on the board have made ad hominem & amazingly racist remarks directed at URM’s & implying de facto superiority of certain races & nationalities.</p>