What should I put for race?

Bay
Thu, 29 Jan 2009 20:31:42 +0000

In my mind, the contention with AA stems from where one establishes the “pool” from which to determine whether discrimination is occurring. The anti-AA crowd looks just at the applicant pool, and calculates its arguments based upon the admitted racial percentages and measurable stats versus the applicant percentages and stats.

The pro-AA crowd (including universities, I suspect) looks at the broader picture, all the way down to the basic “All men are created equal” starting point. If the admitted class is not somewhat representative of the entire pool of American citizens, then something is deemed to be wrong with the entire system of education, of which colleges and universities are a part, because there should be no reason that citizens of every race would not want to be a part of the highly educated class.

The reason could be that the admissions criteria currently used favor certain races over others. Harvard, for example, seems to make a special effort to combat this by making clear that there are no minimum gpa or test score requirements (in fact, I’m not sure a h.s. diploma is required), in order to encourage all to apply. On the other hand, it is widely known (probably from USNWR-type ranking pressures) that H admits students with the top stats. This would obviously scare away many applicants who do not have those stats.