What caught my eye was how some negative reaction to this “attempt” at affirmative action was considered as “hidebound nationalists”. Over here the case was considered as bordering the ridiculous in how badly it was set up… basically blacks get the worst possible education until high school and then they have a fixed 40% quota for that public university (which are the best in Brazil). The differences between whites and black who did enter were extremely big. Whites scoring twice as much in many cases…but well I digress.
Since the US has a comparably big black population and has had affirmative action for sometime... I ask:
Affirmative Action in higher education has been how sucessful ?
What about lower and middle education has there been actions to help blacks at these levels ?
Are blacks seen in the US as inferior university graduates since they get in easier ? Do employers tend to think a black had it “easy” due to AA and is therefore possibly not as smart as an equivalent white graduate? ( I want only the AA effect on this)
How much does US Affirmative Action really help boost the chances of getting into a university ? (Correct me if I am wrong... I understand that AA gives only a small and marginal advantage. 2-5% only or less.)
AA is usually "bonus points" given right ? Or are there "quotas" ?
Has US society become more "color friendly" and "more equal" due to AA even if only a bit ?
I understand that much of the perceived effects of AA are personal.. and might be different due to political or racial profile. So if relevant do indicate your "Race" and Political views....
Wait a minute. Why does Brazil need affirmative action? I thought Brazilians didn’t recognize race because almost everyone is mixed?
Now in the US, it’s been mixed. On one hand, you are getting more minorities in universities, but on the other, more successful minorities are being excluded, such as Asians. And many African-Americans and Hispanics are getting into schools they arent prepared for and flunking out when they could have gone to a less prestigious school and graduated.
I think it’s an old policy that has passed its point of usefulness. End it.
I was happy to be able to game the AA system back in the early days of AA at the University of Texas Law School. I was already in the school when I found out that I was Hispanic! I’m as Irish as O’Reilly, reared with an educational silver spoon in my mouth, having already enjoyed college, graduate school and a professional school on full scholarships. Imagine my surprise when I got the only Hispanic scholarship for my law school class based on the fact of my birth in Paraguay!
I wasted no time rubbing that in the noses of my overwhelmingly liberal law school classmates. It must have had an effect, because by graduation they all, even the many Chicanos, had donned three-piece suits and become Republicans!
It is lamentable that the dreams of so many Blacks and Asians are frustrated by our educational system, for different reasons. But the real tragedy of education is that it is publicly supported. Apart from guaranteeing mediocrity, public administration and support guarantee that Blacks and Hispanics, especially, pay to support a white-folks’ luxury they can’t really enjoy themselves. The only equivalent travesty is represented by our National Parks and Forests and National Monuments, where you will almost never see a Black, Hispanic or Native American face among the visitors, whether at Mesa Verde that is surrounded by Chicanos and Tribal lands or at the Liberty Bell in the center of Philadelphia. That, in addition to mismanagement, is a good reason for privatizing all public universities, lands and monuments. One thing you can say about private facilities, whether Disney, Six Flags, or even any exclusive country club, is that they don’t discriminate against minorities while taking their money! The situation is so embarrassingly out of balance on public lands that the Park Service is thinking of busing in Blacks from the East. (kidding!)
And speaking of Disney, you can see lots of minorities there, even some reported 3 million Brazilians of various colors. Except for the three southern states of Brazil (Paraná, Sta Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul), Brazil is a country of vast and historical miscegenation. Almost all my friends in Rio claim to be a mixture of Black, Indian and White, making me feel that the whole idea of affirmative action in Brazil is more laughable than tragic. But that won’t keep me from applying for a scholarship on the basis of being an Irish Paraguayan!
Just out of curiosity, jimbino, do all of your posts turn into wildly tangential rants about how everything should be privatized? This is the third thread I’ve seen you do that in.
The thing is that 60% of Brazilians are some kind of black/white mixture in various tones… fewer are BLACK black… and WHITE white. The problem is that most browns and blacks are poor than whites. So there is racial “peace”… but not racial “equal prosperity”.
Public education sucks big time EXCEPT in the Universities. Poor people cant pay for a good school and end up unable to compete for the better universities.
So yes AA seems to be ridiculous...but they are insisting in implementing it anyway. (Political considerations more than logical) Many times they point the US out as a semi-sucessful example... so that is why I am checking dopers opinions/views.
It might be that I am defending the luxuries that my white middle class have... but I think its more about not treating blacks like retards and give them a REAL chance at higher education... by teaching them well since they enter school... not by giving them a good university they can barely keep up with.
From my experience both as a student and then working in the “underbelly of academia” (contractless researcher who gets put into the same pay, benefits, and administrative categories as do the janitors and secretaries), I’ve determined that the results of “affirmative action” in US higher education are, at best, mixed. In fields like “Race Relations” majors and “Urban Law” majors, there is something approaching (or exceeding) the level of various minorities in the population. In the real sciences, in business, in general law, etc. the situation is still pretty much lily-white with one exception: Lots of folks with east Asian ancestors (like me–although I don’t look it).
In essence, I blame the atrocious education of children before they get to the college level. Coming to college with no science background pretty much precludes science in college. Coming to college with no idea that one can and will become a leader and/or a tycoon pretty much stops one from wanting to try business as a major.
Until the basic educational level improves, I predict that Brazil will see a similar divide. “African Studies” will be heavily “integrated” while astrophysics will not. There are some counter-examples, like Tuskegee (which produces excellent scientists), but they are quite rare in the larger scheme of things.
First, in the USA, “AA” usually refers to “Alcoholic Anonymous”. So an “AA initiatives at lower levels of education” would refer to a volunteer group treating alcoholism in the schools.
As for “affirmative action” in schools, it’s been tried. It failed. Cities were forced to reassign students among schools in an attempt to “equalize” their opportunities and to assign funding “equally” to all schools within a city. The result: “White Flight”.
Rich people moved out of the cities and into communities where they could control everything directly. It would be absurd and cruel to move children 60, 100 or more kilometers every day to school. Public schools in the USA are mostly funded by local taxes, so if a community has no money, its schools have very little funding. Likewise, a community with a bad reputation does not attract the best teachers.
Not really. After all, affirmative action may help you get into the university, but it doesn’t help you get passing grades. White or black, they have to do the same coursework in order to graduate.
That depends upon the individual university. If a university is willing to accept absolutely no Federal funding, then it has very little affirmative action requirement. Individual universities that traditionally pride themselves on being politically “liberal” tend to give a greater “advantage”. However, it should be noted that some methods are harder to legally defend than others. An automatic “race bonus” seems to have been deemed unconstitutional. That is, one cannot compile a numeric “score” of factors for admission then automatically add a bonus to the score depending upon race–at least not according to a recent Supreme Court ruling. However, it is still legal for an admissions office to use “subjective factors” and “desire to encourage diversity” to prevent a campus from becoming all one race. What is usually ignored in this is that “white” is not always the same thing. Merely having a genetic accident of sharing a “race” in no way means that a group of people is necessarily “less diverse”. Try to tell a Serb and a Croat that they are essentially identical merely because both of them are “white”. Remember to duck.
There is also the Bakke decision to take into account and the fact that actual specific “quotas” of minimum numbers of “minority” students are technically illegal.
As a black woman in the sciences, chances are that I have benefitted from AA. There. I said it.
I attended an undergrad institution that was very white, and currently I’m a grad student in a program with no other black graduate students or faculty members, although the school is square in the middle of one of the “blackest” cities in the country. I don’t know if I have gotten boosts in opportunities simply because of my race and/or gender, but chances are that I have. I could shed tears about it and feel guilty, but instead I just try to excel in what I do. That’s how my parents raised me.
I have had to cope with a stigma because of AA. It doesn’t matter if I am well qualified on paper (and I think I am, but what do I know?); the perception is that I’m an incompetent token who would be sweeping floors somewhere if it wasn’t for AA. For some reason, racial minorities get this treatment much more than white women do, even though white women have benefited heavily from AA. There have been many times when I have wished there was no such as AA, if only because of this reason.
I think AA as a way of diversifying the school environment/ workplace has been successful, but I don’t know how harmful or helpful it has been in giving minorities a financial leg-up. If AA helped me get into school, does that mean I wouldn’t have gotten there on my own? And if an AA beneficiary flunks out of school, how do we know that AA–and not personal shortcomings independent of race and economics–played a part?
Personally, I don’t think AA is as bad as its opponents make it out to be, nor is it the panacea that others believe it is. If we got rid of AA right now it would not be the end of the world. But I do think it’s better than doing nothing at this point in time. It’s not the best “something”, but it’s something. The best things to do would be to revolutionize how poor (especially urban) kids are educated and to level the playing field economically rather than just racially. But these things are much harder to do, and the powers-at-be have a vested interest in keeping things the way they are.
Over here in this first university the ridiculous combination of two pretty unbalanced laws created a almost comical situation.
Law One said 40% quota for students from the weaker public schools…
Law Two said 40% quota for blacks.
So if by chance all the public school quota were blacks then the other 60% would be for those with the best grades of any race. Naturally things got screwed up from there on…
Almost all of the public school quota were won by poor/lower middle class whites. Which meant that almost 40% extra had to be handed to blacks students not even good enough to grade well among the public school students. 70%+ of the vacancies were taken… well off white students with very good grades were suddenly left out since the measly 30% left were too few.
A girl who got 120 points didn’t pass… a black girl with 49 passed. That is how skewed the results were. (numbers are more or less.) These blacks will be sharing classroom with people who outscored them badly… do you think both will get a better education from this “mix” ? No wonder reactions were so bad.
I go to a Big 10 University, and I can tell you that my ancedotal experience has caused me to dislike the idea of affirmative action even more than I did before.
My boyfriend and I both graduated #1 out of our class of 400+. He scored a 34 on the ACT, I scored a 33. Both of us were well qualified students, in the top 1 percentile of freshman entering the same university.
He’s a white guy, and I look like a white girl. I am hispanic however, and have never encountered any type of racism. That was the only reason why I recieved a scholarship and he did not. My parents could have afforded to send me to any school I wanted, his parents had to work harder to come up with the money (and will continue to for the next 3 years), so it was not my economic situation. Our credentials were identical.
This is not a promotion of diversity. If you want people from truly different “backgrounds,” look at the rural/suburban/urban ratio of students. Look at the income. Look at the school size. That is a promotion of diversity.
See, that’s just the thing. If Brazilians don’t care about race, and discrimination is not holding darker people back, then it doesn’t matter that darker people just happen to be doing worse economically. Government can prevent discrimination. It cannot socially engineer outcomes, and to even try is harmful to society.
If Brazil doesn’t care about race now, they will soon. Lula has seen to that. This is the politics of divisiveness. It seems like a way for him to gain a guaranteed constituency that will always support his party.
At Michigan, one of their arguments is that success is not just getting people of color or from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds into schools and fields where they have been previously underrepresented. Success is also providing a better education to every student on campus. Some people claim that the best possible education comes when you only admit the absolutely top-scoring students (on standardized tests) who have the highest possible grades. Michigan disagrees. They claim teh best possible education comes when you combine quality with a diversity of experiences and backgrounds.
Whether or not you buy that argument is the question. It’s hard to quantify, too.
**adaher, ** you claim that “many African-Americans and Hispanics are getting into schools they arent prepared for and flunking out when they could have gone to a less prestigious school and graduated.” Can you expound on this a little? How many is many? You can’t just cite statistics on persistence because that doesn’t tell us how many of those students actually “flunked out”, versus leaving for other reasons that have nothing to do with affirmative action. How many of these students transferred, instead of dropping out? How much evidence do you have that they would have fared better at a “less prestigious” institution?
I have no doubt that there are students who are underprepared who struggle at university, and some of them leave. I just think your statement is a little too broad and unspecific.
Why does “diversity” automatically mean “dark skin color”?
You get a whole bunch of upper middle class kids of different skin colors and they are a more “diverse” group inherently than would be a cross-section of all social levels that happened to not have a lot of different skin colors?
Doesn’t that mean that the purveyors of “diversity” are ultimately buying into the exact same racist worldview they claim to be fighting? If “diversity” is defined as good, but it is also only measured by the color of skin, that means that one considers race to be the sole or at least the primary determinant of human behavior–the fundamental underpinning of racism.