Affirmative action is weird. I would entirely support keeping the existing, race-blind procedure in place at TJ, but there are other situations (e.g. medical school) where the rationale is less clear. On the one hand, it is important to keep the merit in merit-based admission, but on the other hand, there are an overwhelming number of qualified applicants, and it is in patients' interests to have doctors available from similar ethnic backgrounds to their own. My opinion on the TJ matter swings the other way because "nerds" are selected for their brains and brains alone - to the exclusion of many other qualities more relevant than race - so race seems to be somewhat of a non-issue in the resulting population.
As an aside, one of the issues which bothers me most about affirmative action seldom seems to get much attention. When someone with lower academic suitability is admitted based on some other, normalizing rationale, their lower academic performance is going to stick out in the resulting student environment like a sore thumb. In other words, if Martian-Americans get a bonus weighting factor of 10% to their composite admission test scores in order to balance out the numbers, then the incoming class is going to include a bunch of smart non-Martians and a bunch of Martian-American students who are on average 10% less capable than the other students! So let's see... I'm a white kid going to a school with a "balanced" population, and I notice that the Martian-Americans sure seem 10% dumber than everyone else. Tell me again how this is supposed to be a normalizing force?
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Date: 2004-07-09 11:32 am (UTC)As an aside, one of the issues which bothers me most about affirmative action seldom seems to get much attention. When someone with lower academic suitability is admitted based on some other, normalizing rationale, their lower academic performance is going to stick out in the resulting student environment like a sore thumb. In other words, if Martian-Americans get a bonus weighting factor of 10% to their composite admission test scores in order to balance out the numbers, then the incoming class is going to include a bunch of smart non-Martians and a bunch of Martian-American students who are on average 10% less capable than the other students! So let's see... I'm a white kid going to a school with a "balanced" population, and I notice that the Martian-Americans sure seem 10% dumber than everyone else. Tell me again how this is supposed to be a normalizing force?