How do young kids know if they would enjoy play piano, swimming, dancing, play chess etc? They start by doing it, if they do it well, they can start liking it. If you try many activities when you are young, chances are you will find several that you enjoy doing and do them well. What exactly is wrong with padding resume, when live in a real world where if you want to go to top universities, you have to pad your resume.
Her grades were nowhere good enough for direct admission to UT. The article I posted earlier goes into detail about her academic record and how own attorneys barely even contest that, were it not for race, she would've been accepted. They know her grades were not high enough and that's why she was offered admission via the CAP program (no longer in place at UT) where she could've gone to UTSA for a year, achieved a 3.2 GPA and been automatically transferred to UT Austin. She declined that offer because she felt it was beneath her. I was accepted to UT with slightly better test scores than Fisher under the summer freshman program, which also doesn't exist anymore. That meant starting my freshman year in June and taking 9 hours of classes in 2.5 months as a way of "proving myself" to UT. I knew it's where I wanted to go to school and I would've done anything to become a full-fledged Longhorn. Fisher felt that because her parents attended UT, she deserved to as well with subpar grades. In the end, she didn't want to work for what she claimed she wanted so badly. In a vacuum, it isn't. But, the crux of Fisher's argument is that her test scores and grades should've been enough for admission to UT and that minority students with worse records were admitted at her expense solely because of their skin color. However...
If it's a worthwhile discussion to have, fine. I mean that. But to have this dumb b**** (sorry) as the flag bearer is pathetic. No HR dept. on earth is going to let someone hire her now (unless as an intern at Drudge Report or some crap).
The entitlement.... It... Is... Blinding!!! They really should have found an actually qualified white person to be the model for this case.
whether or not this particular girl deserved to get into UT is beside the point... Affirmative Action is an imperfect solution to a bigger problem which is that there is a vast gap in the quality of education poorer students get compared to their rich counterparts. They way to address this issue is to make all schools have equal resources so that everyone, no matter where they go to school, can have access to the same education. Short of that happening, AA is a necessary policy and one which, IMO, makes society better. I think AA can be modified somewhat and factor in income levels. I could do with Harvard/Princeton etc. not consisting of 50% upper class rich kids. That will never happen though, as those schools rely on donations from those people.
if the resource is the problem, we should use a income based AA, the truth is most of the AA beneficiaries for under represented minority groups are not from poor families or under funded school districts.
It was probably just too damned hard to find such a person, because there really isn't a problem here. Universities don't just go by grades and scores. They look at extracurriculars, they look at gender (yes, newsflash -- colleges let in dumb guys before slightly smarter girls all the time now, b/c the gender balance is so skewed), they look at regional distribution, international distribution, and yes, yawn, racial/ethnic background. BFD.
So does AA help out women or do Uni's let in dumb dudes? Can you explain how those are not in conflict? Not sure I buy this but if it is true why the hell should AA be continued. Higher education is dominated by female students.
This woman probably didn't deserve admission but part of the reason we should get rid of AA is that without it, there would be no question as to if she would have been admitted if she was a different race. Personally I don't think things like race, sex, religion, or sexual preference should be allowed to be on college admissions because those factors should be irrelevant when it comes to gaining admission to a school. When any of those factors matter either as a positive or negative, then you have a problem.
How can you say that when, to quote ProPublica and the case's own legal filings, "168 black and Latino students with grades as good as or better than Fisher's who were also denied entry into the university that year. " There were hundreds of minority students with better grades than her that were denied admission that year, too. Had she been a minority, it was no guarantee that she would've been admitted.
My understanding of AA (but I don't work at a public school) is that it's more about underserved minority students than women versus men. As you rightly note, higher ed is overall awash in women. My point is that there are all sorts of "unfair" considerations in admissions. It seems odd (but typical of our current national discourse) to just whine about racial considerations. Honestly, being at a university, here's what I think is most unfair. Students of privilege (no matter their race) have the chance for lots of clubs and sports and activities and crap. Poor kids just don't have the same access. So when a university considers extracurriculars as a good thing, they are automatically making a huge socio-economic filter. I volunteer with poor kids, helping them put together college applications. They never have extracurriculars b/c they work, they take care of little siblings, a sick parent, on and on, you name it. And they know they're behind the eight ball compared to Buffy and Biff and swim team and model UN and on and on. Some of the kids I work with are so flipping inspiring though. Smart, tough kids. Or smarter and tougher than I was at least. Cheers.
So no justification on the statement that universities let in dumb guys over smarter girls? It seemed pretty silly, my guess is the opposite is true and that is why the current gender inequality exists. We can argue about racism all we want but at the end of the day it is men who are being ****ed in education. Glad I am not in high school right now.
Because there were people who were admitted with as good or worse grades as her. I'm not saying that it's true, I'm saying that if race, sex, or whatever other irrelevant BS wasn't even taken into account then there's no room to think one of those things hurt or helped anyone. Personally I think she just wasn't good enough, but since factors like sex and race are weighed in the first place when it comes to admissions, there's room to speculate. I would rather there wasn't.
What does rich vs poor have to do with race based AA? I don't see anything preventing children from poor families obtaining good grades. In fact, I would think that they have some extra motivation to excel.
She would have probably gotten in before Hopwood, those "Unconditional/Conditional Admission" charts were pretty cut and dry back then.
That is 1180 out of 1600. On the 2400 score it would be 1770 assuming her writing was the same score of 590. Average score for UT I think that year was like 1870 or something close to it so she was within the range.
What race based disadvantages are minority students suffering in the lower levels of education? When you mark that you are black on the SAT, do they knock off 400 points from your score (or 600 on this new 2400 point system)? Do teachers knock a black student's grade down a letter when grading papers? We absolutely should not have racial discrimination at lower levels either. Somehow I doubt you are actually talking about racial discrimination, and are more likely talking about people going to the nearest school to their home. At some point the student has to be accountable for what they accomplish. Some of the worst performing public schools in America are also some of the best funded. DC schools spend more money per student than any state. Guess where they rank in terms of achievement. How would you guess they compare to Utah public schools (who I believe have the lowest per student spending).
The standards in Utah aren't the same as they are in DC so it isn't really possible to compare. Black students are more often misidentified as special needs and under identified as gifted. The difference in the level of instruction from those two programs alone is absolutely significant.
