Submission: Affirmative action debate is misguided

By David Cooper

Recently there has been a great deal of controversy regarding affirmative action. Personally I am opposed to affirmative action, though for more articulate reasons than UCLA’s Young Americans for Liberty, I would hope to think. My primary reason is that affirmative action fails to address the source of the problem that leads to a lack of diversity in America’s leading universities. It is a bandage on a stab wound, so to speak.

Consider the black demographic, which makes up roughly 13 percent of our nation’s population. Blacks make up approximately 4 percent of UCLA’s undergraduate student population as of fall 2012, 6.5 percent at the University of Virginia, approximately 3 percent at UC Berkeley and 6 percent at Yale University. The disparity between the population of black people in the nation and black students in universities indicate that either blacks are inferior or that black people in general have been failed by American schools. If you look up the statistics regarding Latinos, the same is true. And of course it is true that these two groups of people are not inferior, but have been failed by the American primary and secondary education systems. But have American schools failed all children of Latino and black descent?

To answer this question let us consider Harvard University. Harvard has been doing a good job at maintaining diversity, a much better job than the aforementioned schools. In 2011 Harvard admitted 11.8 percent black students, in 2012, 10.2 percent. Unfortunately there is something wrong with what Harvard did, what all schools do when basing affirmative action solely on race. According to Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of the W.E.B Du Bois Institute of African and African-American Research, Harvard tends to admit middle-class and upper-class black kids who have been furnished with the same benefits as the general student population.

Get it straight folks, affirmative action as it exists does not address and amend education disparity. I understand that people want a diverse campus. But diversity will naturally happen once the disparity in primary and secondary education is fixed, after which we won’t need this fundamentally degrading system. Blacks and Latinos are underrepresented in American universities because they are more likely to live in poverty or near-poverty. Impoverished neighborhoods generally have bad schools, schools that fail to adequately educate and graduate all the students who attend them, regardless of whether they are black, Latino, Asian-American or white.

Consider this: Most high school graduates attend college, yet for the 2007-2008 school year, only 28 percent of kids who attended “high-poverty schools” made it there. The issue is poverty. The issue is that, for the most part, poor schools attract worse teachers, and furthermore, are generally located in violent and drug-ridden environments – environments not conducive to education.

These are the kids that don’t have a chance of going to Harvard and UC Berkeley, and have a slim to no chance of going to UCLA. Affirmative action should be based on economic background, but this must only be a temporary solution. For even to select kids accurately from these underfunded schools is impossible, because most likely the schools are not good assessors of students. Thus, until American public schools are equally equipped to educate students irrespective of neighborhood, American universities will fail to be diverse, and will fail to pick the best students.

We need to rethink affirmative action.

Affirmative action, as it now exists, implies that race actually matters. I would like to think that, on a fundamental level, there is absolutely no difference between black, white and brown. I would like to think that, if we all were in the same socioeconomic conditions, if we all had the same opportunities, that there would be no difference between the varying “races” except skin color.

Cooper is a fourth-year philosophy student.