By Natalia Castro
Time and time again, policies the left creates to assist minorities in the country are proven ineffective and unfair to these student’s counterparts. Finally, the Department of Justice is answering the call to investigate policies like affirmative action, which hinders the success of other students. In an effort to restore fairness from the failed policies of previous administrations, the DOJ is taking steps to sue Universities using race to determine admission status.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions is reported to be reviewing a case filed against Harvard University by a coalition of Asian American groups in 2015 claiming racial discrimination. These students were held to a different academic standard than other minority groups in the admissions process.
The reason for the unfair practice is affirmative action.
Under affirmative action, universities can use race as a factor in admissions, attempting to provide minority students with a greater chance of attending colleges. Evidently, Asian American students are not considered “minority enough” to receive the benefit, resulting in clear discrimination during the admissions process.
The inherent problem with policies intended to help minorities, is they often force minorities to “compare their privilege” in order to receive benefits. The policies do not judge based on merit alone, therefore making it more difficult for hard working students not part of a minority group to succeed.
Rita Dunaway of the Virginian Christian Alliance wrote on World Net Daily, “However nice ‘affirmative action’ may sound, it is an undeniably unjust form of discrimination. It discriminates against individuals based upon a characteristic that it is not only immutable, but has no rational relationship to the position being sought. For, of course, a student’s race has zero bearing on his or her aptitude, merits or likelihood of academic success at a given institution. For this reason, we should applaud Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ announcement that the Justice Department will seek to curb the nefarious practice in university admissions.”
The complaint against Harvard alleges that Asian students had to have SAT scores 140 points higher than white students, 270 points higher than Hispanics, and 450 points higher than black students in order to be admitted. Creating a literal ranking system of “privilege”, even I remember white students attempting to find their 1/16th Native American heritage to receive easier admittance to top tier universities.
While the Supreme Court ruled last year in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin that race can be used in admission decisions, it must be done “if it furthers the compelling interest of maintaining diversity for the educational benefit of students”.
Harvard is hardly maintaining diversity when its policies prevent Asian American and even white students from having a fair chance to attend the university. The case also notes that race can be used, but it does not have to be and the admissions offices would do better without it.
Even the left leaning Atlantic produced a report in 2012 by Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr. which showed that, “The mismatch effect happens when a school extends to a student such a large admissions preference — sometimes because of a student’s athletic prowess or legacy connection to the school, but usually because of the student’s race — that the student finds himself in a class where he has weaker academic preparation than nearly all of his classmates.”
Per Sander and Taylor, citing various studies, black college freshmen are more likely to aspire to science or engineering careers than are white freshman, but abandoned these fields at twice the rate of white students. Similarly, about half of black college students rank in the bottom 20 percent of their classes and the bottom 10 percent in law classes.
To be clear, this is not a racial issue where minority students simply cannot succeed, it is that when any student is placed in a University not based upon merit, but race, the chances of that student succeeding are harmed creating the opposite of the intended effect. In the meantime, other students who might have excelled in similar academic setting were not given the opportunity because of different standards for admission.
Finally, the Department of Justice appears to be fighting discrimination by ensuring that every student has an equal chance. As affirmative action policies fuel the oppression Olympics and incentivize students to compete for greater minority status to receive benefits, they discriminate against other students working legitimately hard to succeed. All universities would be better without this policy. Luckily, Attorney General Jeff Sessions is bringing back passion and hard work as the true drivers of accomplishment.
Natalia Castro is a contributing editor at Americans for Limited Government.
