[quote]SexMachine wrote:
[quote]Severiano wrote:
[quote]UtahLama wrote:
[quote]Severiano wrote:
I’m taking a guess when the racial makeup of schools is really looked at in the next ten years we will see a decline in minority and low income students achieving degrees. [/quote]
Even if they achieved said degrees at the expense of more qualified students?
What of their hard work?[/quote]
To what end to we merit hard work?
Whose to say that someone who goes to an inner city school with less opportunity is working more or less than the kid from a rich suburb going to a private school? Do we look at their grades and assume the kid from the suburbs is working harder based on grades? I’m not saying it is necessarily subjective, but it can be the case that the kid from the inner city is working harder to achieve lower grades. Or didn’t have the quality of teacher or extra curricular things to take part in. Maybe the kid is working after school to pay for books while the advantaged kid can spend that time donating time to the community?
At this point that doesn’t even factor into it though. Right now we are just justifying it all based on some bullshit notion that affirmative action itself is a racist thing used to combat racism as well as lack of opportunity. I’m not saying affirmative action is perfect, but what are we doing to replace it? What about the poor?
If we can all agree that lack of education leads to lack of success, we all agree that an education from the inner city public school is inferior to a private school education from a suburb, what more evidence do we really need to say that one is disadvantaged?
Like I said, it’s sad. Ultimately as a country we fail to keep sight of the big picture, or our own history. Pretty soon college is going to be the advanced school for whites and asians. [/quote]
Maybe the kid who failed every subject is working hardest. Grades are the only possible objective measure we have to evaluate performance. To say that someone may have worked harder even though their grades are lower, and that they should be given preferential treatment is beyond absurd. And affirmative action legislation doesn’t give preferential treatment based on the type of environment the student comes from. It gives preferential treatment based solely on race.[/quote]
Great point. Are we doing anything about it though? I’m not trying to defend affirmative action in that sense, as I also see amongst Asian as well as Whites there are large groups that could be broken down into smaller groups for the sake of identifying people who need, and rate the same sort of help that affirmative action brings.
Maybe it IS time to revamp it to help kids based on family income rather than race.
I know for a fact that there are Asian ethnic groups that tend to score below the mean of Asians in general, and as a result they aren’t very well, “represented” in different colleges and Universities. In that sense it’s unfair to compare someone who is culturally say Amerasian with roots from say Korea vs. an Amerasian with roots from Vietnam and I don’t know say Hmong culture.
It’s unfair also to categorize some kid whose parents are white but factory workers, possibly single parent to an upper class nuclear family from the suburbs.
The thing that is going to be scary is if we do nothing. The thing is, at the end of the day the glaring statistic is going to be the lack of minorities with 4 year degrees or some sort of junior college education. If we don’t do something about it, we will look back and just shake our heads at ourselves.
Scary path we may be going down.