More on affirmative action

Below in an earlier post, I had some thoughts on the affirmative action case before SCOTUS. If I had the chance, I would have to ask college administrators the following question: how well do the students fare who are admitted with the under-represented minority bonus score?

If they do poorly, then the affirmative action plan that got them in actually doing them a dis-service! What is the point of saying our enrollment is a diverse population, hooray; then to look at graduation rates and see that diversity disappear. The mission of the university is educational. A diversity of student body experience is of value in the future job market where globalization will be a major factor. However, that diversity value is lost if those under-representated students wind up dropping out.

On the other hand, if the students admitted under affirmative action actually do okay in school then we are balancing the benefit of diversity with reasonable fairness in admissions. In the abstract, we want as fair an admissions process as possible. But in practice, in the job market, the job interview process is rarely a completely fair system. We can't really expect college admissions to be completely fair either. If a person from an under-represented minority gets in and still does well in school then it may well be worth the price of a small number of over-represented individuals having to take their second choice school.

There clearly are under-represented groups. But what if we make an effort to improve their K-12 educational experience? K-12 education is invariable going to have geographic differences because most kids go to their neighborhood school. When it comes time to apply for college those geographic differences can show up as differences in SATs. GPAs and class ranking can give some indications but are subject to local variables. Someday, we can have good education for all kids so they can all compete on an even footing for college and the notions of under-represented and over-represented will become meaningless.

Certainly, this is a big fight. But let's keep some perspective on the value of a college education. It is an advantage to have a college degree in the job market. Though, the truly brilliant and ambitious will find college not challenging enough i.e. the Bill Gates of the world who are college drop outs and are billionaires! But think of the people you know. Many successful people didn't go to Harvard? Is a degree from BIG University T really any different than SMALL liberal arts college U's degree? Perhaps in some fields of study but in most cases, that HR person looking over resumes isn't going to automatically pick somebody because they went to university W and toss out a resume because they went to college X.