On Monday the Supreme Court ruled on a University of Michigan lawsuit filed by three aspiring law school students. The trio claimed that they were unjustly denied admittance to Michigan's law school because they're white and their applications had been denied in a university effort to diversify the campus by enrolling minorities, even if this meant accepting less qualified applicants.
In a split decision, the Supreme Court declared that using race as a determining factor in student admissions is constitutional. However, Michigan will no longer be allowed to use their current admittance formulas. As it stands, Michigan automatically awards 20 out of a possible 100 points to any student that checks a minority box on a college application leaving non-minority students the responsibility of making up these points with ACT scores, GPA's, and community service projects. The Supreme Court ruled that this equation was flawed because it doesn't spend adequate time assessing the individual student.
While the banishment of Michigan's antiquated formula is progress, the battle is far from over.
Notions of racial equality in the U.S. have been abound for hundreds of years. The most historic moment came in 1961when President Kennedy stated that employers should take "affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed...without regard to race, creed, color, or national origin." Affirmative action means employment and academic selections regardless of race.
Yet this is not how affirmative actions is applied.
Over the years affirmative action has been egregiously corrupted - it has gone from the purist notion of equal opportunity for all to the idea that all underprivileged peoples deserve compensation for being neglected either in the academic or the professional arena, to the assumption that all minorities and women are underprivileged. This last stage in the evolution is the most parasitic.
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Using race as a deciding factor does make sense at the undergrad level. But in granting Michigan the right to base post-bachelor admittance status on race is equivalent to giving handouts after the problem has been rectified. When people apply for graduate school, medical school, or law school, their current skills and assets should speak louder than whether or not they are black, white, Hispanic, Indian, or Asian. Professional programs take bigger risks and stand to lose more by making exceptions than do undergraduate programs.
If affirmative action attempts to rectify the disadvantages of minorities and level the playing field, doesn't it make sense to do so sooner than rather later?
It's common knowledge that students coming out of high school are at varying academic degrees. Because of the decadent conditions of many inner city schools and the surprisingly high number of minority students that go to these schools, there is justification in giving the underprivileged students that attend these schools some leeway when applying to undergraduate programs.
To claim that after four or five years of higher education college graduates who went to "poor" high schools are still trying to catch up to students who went to "average" high schools is ludicrous. If underprivileged students are still falling behind after attaining a college degree, this is not an institutional problem, it is an individual problem.
By the time a student attains a bachelor's degree, the academic shortcomings endured in high school should have been rectified.
The belief that affirmative action rewards should be given to graduate students demeans the value of a college degree. If an underprivileged student's deficiencies haven't been repaired by the time a diploma is given, the university is handing out a degree that hasn't been earned.
Some emphasis must be placed on the individual to overcome personal setbacks, and as adults, everyone must accept that though they may have been slighted, it's partly their responsibility as capable beings to make up for lost time. Relying on the system to give them a lifetime of breaks is unconstitutional and unjustly discriminates against those "privileged" people who work hard.
For students who prefer to be rewarded for their merits and skills rather than their race or gender, there's always California, Texas, Mississippi, and Louisiana - states where affirmative action in higher education has been outlawed.
