Affirmative Action

Ok, so I reread my post, and it came out a bit harsh.  That was not my intent.

RPI is a good school, and you should be proud to be there.  But your buddy didn't "take your spot" at MIT - you were an extreme long shot to go there in the first place.

Schools like Harvard, Yale, and MIT could fill their classes with valedictorians with perfect SAT scores.  They choose not to, for diversity reasons (and not just ethnic diversity).  They might admit the guy who wrote his application with a crayon, or the guy that did the Paris-Dakkar, even though their grades weren't that great.  Or they might take the guy from Utah, because nobody else from Utah applied.

In your case, your extra-curriculars may actually have counted against you.  Maybe they had filled up on choir singers, and were looking for some more football players.  Maybe your essay sucked (if you did one).  I don't know, and neither do you.  Maybe your interview went poorly and the interviewer lied to you (sometimes not interviewing is a good idea).  Who knows.  But seriously - you were a long shot to get in.

As to your friend - it is probable that his race counted in his favor, but extremely unlikely that this was the sole deciding factor.  Maybe his recommendations were particularly stellar, or his essay was great.   I don't know, but I can promise you that MIT doesn't take black people with low GPAs just because they are black.  Simple reason:  They don't have to - they get plenty of applications from black people with good GPAs.  Something about your buddy tickled the admission people's fancy, and we will probably never know what it was.

Dune wrote: Clark Kent wrote: hashi2008 wrote:  You my friend, are an idiot.  Black people get the same that whites get or better.  Coming from experience (which I can assume you have none of because of the way you approach the problem) many black people don't get into college, don't get good grades, don't get good jobs, and generaly do worse in life because they don't want to.  All of the black people at my school that will end up not going to college, going to Grambling State University (all black school near my hometown), or get worse jobs than me are either special ed (very few) or just don't feel like doing the work because thier parents never taught them to do their homework or study.  I have to go, I'll finish this later. And there, in a nutshell, is a very compelling argument for why affirmative action is still very much needed today. Thank you.   Wow, that was so stereotypical and unbelievably ignorant. Clark is right, this type of idiotic belief system is exactly why we still need AA today.

  How is that?  It is not just my belief, it is a fact at the high school I go to.  There are smart black kids, dumb black kids, and slackers.  The same goes for the whites, except the the slacker numbers are a bit smaller in nmbers.  And as for the "diversity makes a better environment" crap, I can learn better in one of my honors class full of smarties than in a class with a few cut-ups.

You guys are talking past each other...

What Hades is saying is that having a diverse student population improves the education for everybody.  It doesn't improve the math class, but it does improve the informal culture/life class that happens before and after math class.

Therefore, his point is that a school has a legitimate interest in having a diverse student population, for the benefit of all.

This is the motivation for giving preference to students from under-represented states, for instance.  Nobody is saying that people in Iowa are disadvantaged, but there aren't many folks from Iowa applying to the University of New Hampshire, so UNH will tend to favor those Iowans that do apply.  This improves their student body by increasing diversity.  The same theory applies to ethnic diversity.

That is A purpose of AA, not the only purpose.

But even so I disagree that race isn't a diversity issue.  Anybody who lives in the US knows that race is a huge issue for the entire country.   It is a very divisive issue, as evidenced by this thread.  Further, most Americans spend most of their lives surrounded overwhelmingly by people of their own color and their own culture.  If diversity is a goal, I don't see how (in the US) race could ever be left out of it.  It would certainly be as important as geography, IMO.

I don't think anybody would dispute, Zesty, that affirmative action is - at best - a very blunt instrument.  Clearly there are misfires.  Some of the wrong people benefit, some of the right people don't benefit.

That's the (or a) sucky part of public policy.