Pros And Cons Of Affirmative Action

Affirmative action has been at the crux of national and statewide debate since its inception during the civil rights movement with lawmakers arguing for and against it countlessly over the past decades (Chrisman). Affirmative action is the process of taking gender, (and more politicized) race, and ethnicity into admissions process (Newell 381). This can occur in a variety of industries, one of the most controversial being postsecondary education: colleges and universities across the nation have affirmative action policies intending to give ethnic minorities access to the same quality of education that historically privileged races have been given. Proponents of affirmative action argue that it is needed to address historic discrimination against
Leading up to and for a decades past the civil rights movement, minorities were victim to “institutional discrimination and social isolation”; this is irrefutable fact (Fryer 13). This discrimination occurred through segregation and established “separate, but equal” laws in the twentieth century that created an environment that decreased the upward economic and social mobility of minorities, these laws prevailed in southern states in particular. During the Civil Rights movement, many of these policies were overturned through lawsuits such as Sweatt v. Painter (1950) where a black man sued the president of The University of Texas at Austin Law School because he was denied admission because of segregation laws. To make up for the past discretions of discrimination against different races and ethnic minorities admissions programs developed affirmative action policy which gave millions of otherwise discriminated against students the opportunity to advance themselves (Newell
Despite critic claims, non minority students as a whole are not all disadvantaged by affirmative action. The Supreme Court of the United States of America recently upheld affirmative action in a situation related to this claim. In Fisher v. University of Texas (2016) a white woman sued UT stating that she was rejected from the university to give way for a minority student. Compared to the Texas freshman profile, Fisher’s application scores were below the UT average for admission, but she claimed that had she been a minority she would have been accepted (Cassidy). This perception of racial preference is not true as only a small percentage 27% of UT students are from historically disadvantaged minorities, this perception comes from the an overestimation of slots for new students when colleges only accept a fraction of their applicant pool (Cassidy, TEXAS Admissions). Even for those students who are at the cutoff for admissions, such as Fisher, the benefits of a college education towards historically advantaged groups is significantly less than that towards disadvantaged groups such as minorities (Fryer 19). The perception that affirmative action causes reverse racism also comes from the idea that all minority admissions are a result of affirmative action, even if that was the case according to the rule of thumb that only 20% of applicants are admitted