Just another Sites At Penn State site
Here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ixqFpI_4BrMWSQVA51Hch_EagIPJ2DIEbsJaXusXe-8/edit?usp=sharing
Feel free to roast everything I have so far it’s just a draft. Also I’m most likely not going to use most of the random graphs I have pasted in that doc.
Back in 2016, during the presidential election season, I remember several of my Chinese friends saying that their parents voted for Trump because they thought he would make it easier for Asian Americans to be accepted into prestigious colleges. Essentially, they believed he would remove the affirmative action system as they knew it. They believed that the current affirmative action system was making it harder for Asian Americans to be accepted into universities, and that getting rid of affirmative action would end this “reverse discrimination,” whether or not it actually existed. But did Donald Trump actually make any changes related to affirmative action, and have those changes come at all close to fully ending affirmative action?
During Obama’s presidency, several guidance documents involving race and school admissions were created. One of these documents stated that colleges and universities were free to “voluntarily consider race to further the compelling interest of achieving diversity,” essentially saying that diversity was an important enough factor for colleges to worry about that they could at least partially judge students’ college applications based on the race of the applicant. Although these guidance documents do not actually determine the law, they help guide and clarify the law’s implementation. Therefore, these documents did not force, but encouraged colleges to consider race during admissions decisions in order to generate diversity on campus.
However, on July 3rd, 2018, the Trump administration rescinded these guidelines. The Education and Justice Departments stated that these policy guidelines, “advocate policy preferences and positions beyond the requirements of the Constitution,” and a spokesman for the Justice Department declared that the executive branch cannot “circumvent Congress or the courts by creating guidance that goes beyond the law.” Along the same lines, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos summed up their decisions by writing, “Schools should continue to offer equal opportunities for all students while abiding by the law.”
The American Civil Liberties Union responded immediately to this move by the Trump administration by saying, “This is another attack by Sessions and President Trump on people of color,” and called the move “a war being waged on civil liberties from the highest levels of government.” The ACLU is upset because affirmative action policies generally all favor minorities or people of color, and revoking those policies will most likely only harm these minorities. Although Trump has not yet fully destroyed affirmative action policies, rescinding the policy guidelines established by Obama, a supporter of affirmative action, marks a start down the path of ridding colleges of affirmative action. However, this is not the only move Trump has made in his campaign to overturn affirmative action.
After July 2018, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy retired from the Supreme Court, giving Trump the ability to further cement this stance on affirmative action. Trump nominated Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh to fulfill the position. Kavanaugh’s views on affirmative action are very similar to Trump’s, which is why many affirmative action supporters are worried. It is expected that he may be the necessary swing vote on the Supreme Court to rule affirmative action unconstitutional.
One lawsuit that is currently underway that could change the fate of affirmative action is S.F.F.A. v. Harvard. Created by Edward Blum, a financial advisor devoted to overturning race-based laws, Students for Fair Admissions is a membership organization similar to the ACLU or NAACP, many of whom are Asian American students with high credentials who were rejected from prestigious universities. They believe that they were unfairly evaluated by Harvard’s college admissions team, and argue that affirmative action is being used to harm their chances. They claim that although many Asian Americans have higher standardized test scores, grades, and extracurricular activities, Harvard grades them lower in the “personal category,” including aspects such as essays, letters of recommendation, and interviews, only because of their race.
While the SFFA hopes to someday remove race entirely from college admissions decisions (i.e. not even having a check-box for an applicant to select their race), it is unlikely that this will happen. Rakesh Khurana, the dean of Harvard College, argues that it is necessary to ask for a student’s race because it often fundamentally shapes who they are. Personally, I feel that if race was such a big part of an applicant’s identity, they would talk about it in their college essays anyways, so there is no need to ask for it in that case. However, it would also make it nearly impossible for colleges to guarantee diversity, which is something many top universities boast. The lawsuit was originally started all the way back in 2014, and aspects of it are still in court today, so it is unlikely that any clear decision will be made any time soon.
Sources:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/15/the-rise-and-fall-of-affirmative-action
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/03/us/politics/trump-affirmative-action-race-schools.html
Possible title: Making College Admissions Fairer through Race-Blind Applications
Nearly 70% of high school graduates nowadays move on to attend college. With so many students applying to college, colleges must have systems that decide whom to accept and whom to reject. However, many people think these admissions procedures are biased and unfair. One famous court case that has been around for the past few years is S.F.F.A v. Harvard, where a large group of students, consisting of mostly Asian Americans, is suing Harvard University because they believe Harvard’s admissions policies unfairly discriminate against Asians. Although this specific court case is only examining any possible discrimination against Asian Americans, its outcome could decide the fate of affirmative action as a whole.
Cornell Law School defines affirmative action today as “A set of procedures designed to eliminate unlawful discrimination among applicants, remedy the results of such prior discrimination, and prevent such discrimination in the future.” Essentially, its goal is to eradicate discrimination while also making up for such discrimination in the past.
Colleges’ affirmative action policies are often highly criticized by the public, and several schools have even been taken to court over them. In 1996, the state of California’s Proposition 209 banned public affirmative action programs in employment, education, and contracting. In 1998, the University of California removed the affirmative action section of their application review process. As a result of this ban, UC Berkeley had a 61% drop in admissions of minority students, and UCLA a 36% drop, proving that the affirmative action had been greatly affecting acceptance rates for minorities.
Affirmative action has clearly been a topic of debate among colleges and students. Although it does help create diversity on college campuses and helps disadvantaged individuals and minorities, the drawbacks of affirmative action outweigh the benefits. Affirmative action is essentially discrimination against non-minorities, it reinforces stereotypes and racism against minorities, it may cause under-qualified students to be accepted into prestigious colleges, and it does not follow the principles of a meritocracy. Colleges and universities should implement new college admissions procedures that do not judge different races more or less harshly, to create fairer and less biased admissions policies.