In case you spent all of spring break with your head under a rock or on top of a pillow, race and discrimination just became the new buzzwords of politics. It seems that, like most important world moments without a ...(back to the article)
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instead of making assumptions, why not actually do some research. we've all heard that argument before, but can you actually point to any evidence to support it?
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In my experience, the people benefiting from "affirmative action" at places like Princeton are all too often minorities from privileged high schools and backgrounds who have suffered no real discrimination in their lives. In the end we end up getting skin deep diversity that allows us all to pat ourselves on the back for how progressive and great we are without having to actually do any hard work of really eradicating inequality. While I can understand affirmative action for minorities who have been discriminated against, our actual policies don't do that and instead end up helping rich black or hispanic kids who went to Andover or Horace Mann.
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You need to ask yourself a number of questions, Reality. (1) What do we use to measure applicants? If we use SATs for example, kids with enough money for SAT tutoring already have a leg up on that. If we use teacher recommendations, even that is problematic because kids who go to impoverished schools will be less likely to get the kind of one-on-one time with good quality teachers as kids at small private schools do. There are a whole host of systemic factors that prohibit the use of any one factor to determine the quality of one applicant as compared to another. (2) You assumptions about people of racial minorities not interacting with others is silly. Maybe they don't interact with you because you have made your attitudes regarding diversity known to others in a way that's offensive to racial minorities. (3) Finally, racism is still alive and well unfortunately. And acknowledging that racial minorities may have faced a whole host of challenges that white students have not leads to the obvious desire to admit more racial minorities as they will contribute to a dynamic group of students with a variety of life experiences, opinions, goals, etc.
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The thing is diversity efforts do hurt the caliber of students. As sighted by a study done by two professors here that spawned the jian li lawsuit, if there were no discrimination in the admission process, blacks enrolled would decrease by 28 percent or so, asians increase by close to that much, and then whites up 2 percent or so. It does hurt and we are accepting candidates relatively unqualified for a group of people who usually don't interact with other ethnicities anyway.
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(1) Admissions *is* need blind. (2) Diversity is important to some of us, and since the admissions people say over and over again that they get so many highly qualified applicants that they could easily fill twice as many seats withuot sacrficing quality, that says that diversity does not have to come at the expense of intelligence or achievement (even as measured by the imperfect standards of GPA and SAT scores). Besides, if Princeton is looking to serve the nation and all nations, stuff like community service, challenging life experiences, different political, spiritual, or ethnic backgrounds are all important factors. But judging from your comments, we need to do a lot more to introduce students to these factors.
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It does appear that you could apply to Princeton and have a 4.0 GPA and a 2200 SAT and you and your application will be discriminated against because you marked on your application that you were white, you did not need financial assistance, and you did not have any parent or relative who had graduated from Princeton University. The application process should be color blind, need blind, sex blind, religion blind, race blind, ect. If you want to end discrimination, you should remove all the buzzwords from the application that gives room and opportunity for discrimination. If you have a 4.0 GPA and a 2400 SAT score, does the schizoid factor get tossed the selection process at Princeton? Did your application get the boot because you did not have a lead part in the high school play? How many nerds want to make "Goddamn Princeton" their national anthem?
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