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Debate Against Racial Preference In College Admissions Affirmative Action Research Paper

Racial Profiling Drachman, Edward R., Robert Langran, and Alan Shank. "Case 4: Race-Based Affirmative

Action in College Admissions: Keep It, Mend It, or End It?" You Decide: Controversial cases in American Politics. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008. 47-67. Print.

"Colleges have given three main justifications for affirmative action policies that would aid certain minority applicants, especially African-Americans and Hispanics: to compensate for long-standing practices of discrimination; to achieve diversity of the student body; and to overcome 'underrepresentation' of historically disadvantaged groups" (47).

"In California in 1995, the Board of Regents decided to stop race-based admissions, and the next year voters passed Proposition 209, which ended racial preferences in all public-sector state programs including college admissions; and laws were soon enacted in Washington State and Florida prohibiting state universities from using race-based admissions policies" (48).

"Critics of racial preference in college admission argue that:

The U.S. Constitution, especially the Fourth Amendment, protects individuals, not groups

The Constitution calls for equal protection under the law, and so should our laws

College admissions should be based mainly on merit as determined by grade point average and standardized test scores

Affirmative action penalizes applicants who themselves were never guilty of discrimination

Colleges at various times discriminated against unprotected groups such as Jews and Asians

By opening college doors wider to historically disadvantaged...

"Affirmative Action in College Admissions." The Nature of Supreme
Court Power. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. 113-18. Print.

"In 1973, Allan Bakke applied to the University of California, Davis, Medical School. At the time, the school used a dual admissions process, in which regular applicants were considered separately from those who identified themselves as 'economically and/or educationally disadvantaged' applicants or members of a 'minority group.' Regular applicants were required to have a minimum undergraduate grade point average of 2.5 or higher, but applicants in the special admission program were not. These special applicants were not ranked against candidates in the general admissions process and instead competed among themselves for sixteen of the one hundred seats in the entering class. During a four-year period, no whites were admitted through the special admissions program, although many applied" (113).

"The Davis program was constitutionally problematic because it used a quota system in which a 'specified percentage…

Sources used in this document:
"The Supreme Court under its new chief justice decided the Meredith v. Jefferson County case, involving the Louisville, Kentucky, public schools, and a companion case involving the public schools of Seattle, Washington, it outlawed the use of race or diversity for any purpose -- benign as well as punitive, inclusionary, or exclusionary. The court found there is no compelling state interest that would justify acknowledgement of group characteristics in public education or the value of diversity" (xv-xvi).

Wygant v. Jackson Board of Education (1986): "Required that the use of racial classification support a compelling interest of state and be narrowly tailored to satisfy that particular interest. The court's ruling in this case also stated that historic social discrimination was not by itself a compelling reason for an affirmative action policy, and that a public employer should only enact such a policy if it is indeed needed" (7).

1994 -- 5th Circuit of the U.S. District Court of Appeals "held that the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment does not permit the University of Texas to establish admissions policies that give preferential treatment to one race over another" (7).
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