California Colleges Mull Return of Affirmative Action

This.

Diversity is a subjective term.

It's being used by politicians and other special interest groups as a way to get support from blacks and Hispanics, at the expense of other groups.

 

This

/thread

 

No, competing against your peers in the same environment isn't a penalty. Going to a **** school is a penalty. You have a warped sense of the effects of reality.

 

Er...no. Certain minority senators fishing for votes don't like those results. There's a good chance the bill will die in California Congress due to public pressure and in almost two decades no counter-referendum has passed, so you are quite simply wrong.

 

The disparate impact is debatable. Sure, overall enrollment numbers have gone down, but graduation numbers have stayed fairly constant. In addition, black students in CA have "lost" as many seats to hispanics as they have to Asians.

In any event, now we're just going around in circles. We're back to having to the fruitless and frankly insulting comparisons of which minorities have it worse and making absurd claims that Asians have it so good in this country (so good that even white students are given an advantage over them). You claim Asian success in the context of college admission is not innate intelligence, simply a function of wealth, and yet when people say, "ok fine let's look at wealth as an admission criteria," you say, "that's not enough, even though I just said myself there's nothing inherent to race."

Finally, I'm not sure why you feel the need to raise the 10% Texas plan with me when I never said CA's system was the only way to do things. I find it interesting that you assume that people who dislike the 10% rule are Asian, particularly when the last big stink about it was a lawsuit by white people. Also, as an aside, the situation of black students in Texas public universities is fairly comparable to black students in the UC system, so I'm not sure what you're trying to argue.

 

Um... a "certain minority" group is simply trying to protect their over representation in the UC school system which is no different from the same middle class white kids that sue to overturn AA because they weren't good enough to compete with their peers.

California Colleges Mull Return of Affirmative Action
By Ted Chen | Wednesday, Mar 12, 2014 | Updated 7:27 PM PDTView Comments (5) | Email | Print


California universities are considering whether to bring back affirmative action policies in effort to more evenly diversify schools that have historically underrepresented certain groups.

 

They are both penalties. Going to a **** school means you don't learn as much. But it is easier to get into the top 10% which means automatic acceptance to any university in the state.

Going to a competitive school means you will learn more than the kid at the **** school, but it is much harder to get into the top 10%, which means you can work very hard and still not get accepted to the best universities in Texas, whereas the kid at the **** school gets in automatically.

 

Of course it doesn't, but it's not inequality. Asians Americans have succeeded wildly in school - it's the one area where they no longer need to direct their efforts. The workforce is an area where they are still struggling more than they should. Asian Americans, like other minorities, still face entrenched inequality in the American workplace and it is an area where they should focus, but they continue to chose to look at university level schooling when they should be more forward looking. When they should meet other minorities halfway and say, look we have got this schooling thing down, but we both face many of the same barriers after school.

By rejecting affirmative action, they are hurting their own natural allies. They are hurting people that still face barriers in schooling which they themselves don't face. It's just like Caucasians not extending the hand to Asian Americans to create more inclusive work places. It's cynical and misunderstands inequality.

I mean I guess it is fine, climb up the totem pole and raise the ladder - I get it. The view is pretty self-interested but I guess makes sense if you think that American education is some post-apocalyptic winner take all system. It is basically the same point of view of those in denial of white privilege in the work place - those who don't want to recognize or try to rectify employment inequalities. It makes sense to think that way, but I will always disagree with a strategy that entrenches inequality of opportunity. Just like I support better inclusion of Asian Americans in the workplace, I support better inclusion of URMs in university.

 

^ this is a good point.

Obama nominated Goodwin Liu to the 9th circuit (filibustered by Republicans, so now he is on the California supreme court), not just because he's a respected legal scholar but because Obama wants to have a rising young jurist of Asian descent to put on the Supreme Court someday, just like his previous two nominations focused on nominating two very well qualified women, one of whom was hispanic.

This is a great idea - IMO - it's high time that there be one given the substantial contribution of Asian Americans to the legal profession.

Liu's ethnicity is being used as a plus factor here because his group is (criminally, IMO) underrepresented. And I'm good with that, and I suspect a lot of posters in this thread would be too.

 

This is such a outrageous comparison, not surprised from a known racist.

Overrepresented ? lol yea let's punish these Asian kids for trying so hard because, you know, Asians are only allowed achieve a certain level success before we make policies to curb them down amirite ?

Sky's the limit for a white kid but ooooo look out if you're Asian, we don't want too many of you in our school

 

The response is so typical Cometswin. I was simply refuting his implication that Californians are unsatisfied with their current admission system by explaining the history of the bill and prop 209, but he feels the need to go off on this crazy tangent. I've been keeping him off the ignore list to watch the Itchy & Scratchy routine between him and Bigtexxx, but I think it's about time...

 

Of course not. That would be racist!

 

I suggest you consider expressing your point in a more coherent way because a number of people didn't know what the hell you were talking about.

Further your "point" is invalid. No one is saying to take random black and Mexicans off the street and plopping them at Cal.

If you don't like it, do what I did, out perform other whites and Asians and you won't have to worry about it.

 

For some reason, Ellen Degeneres' joke during Oscars night keeps popping up in my head all the time. " Two possibilities tonight. Either Twelve Years a Slave will win Best Picture, or......... you're all racists"

 

I was simply saying that picking up morons from off the street and putting them at Cal would increase diversity. You would have a wide array of IQ's which could offer a variety of viewpoints in class. That's stupid, right? That's the point. Diversity for the sake of being diverse is stupid. Purposely choosing people of a certain race over others in order to meet some arbitrary diversity quota is wrong.

 

Diversity for the sake of diversity isn't wrong, but Stupid diversity for the sake of diversity is wrong.

 

So diversity is only good if it is diversity you approve of?

Either you are all in for diversity, or you have an agenda masquerading as diversity.

 

This is basically the same line argument that says "if you support gay marriage you must support bestiality!"


Says a lot more about the speaker.

 

No. Simply putting random uneducated people in the classroom for the sake of diversity isn't good(your example). But a system where qualified applicants are accepted and the student body is more diverse is good.

It's not about any agenda masquerading as anything else. It's about not doing something silly, yet still attaining diversity because it's better for the students who attend those universities.

So in the end it's about providing a better education. Diversity has been proven to be a part of that.