Davka
Senior Member
I understand your reasoning, but the claim that weighting by race provides a more accurate gauge of a group's abilities is not borne out by the evidence.Agreed. However, the fact that most Blacks and a significant number of Hispanics are currently experiencing substandard grade-school education, it is difficult to determine applicant's actual abilities by using a single testing protocol. That's why weighting by race is done, in order to attempt to correct for this problem. Frankly, I believe that weighting by SES would accomplish much the same thing, and would defuse the racialists' objections to Affirmative Action.
Providing preferential admissions for blacks and Hispanics actually causes the academic performance of that group of students to drop well below that of Asian and white students.
Source:
http://www.ceousa.org/attachments/article/548/UM_UGRAD_final.pdf
If you were to provide preference to applicants based on SES, then you would get the same result, except that the drop in college performance would be among the low-SES students instead of among the black and Hispanic students.
Providing slightly easier entry into university does not correct for the problem of a substandard school education. Lack of money, living in a gang-infested neighbourhood, and attending a poorly-funded, overcrowded school are (some of) the problems that need to be addressed by the state and federal governments in order to ensure that more students graduate from high school with the ability to get a college degree.
This is a problem that can be easily addressed by the colleges. One example is the University of Hawaii, which I attended - they simply assume that freshman students did not learn the basics of Math, English composition, or Geography (iirc) in High School, and require intro-level (pre-collegiate, really) classes in all three. Students can challenge these courses (which I did), but most don't - either because they represent easy credits or (more likely) because they really did not learn shit in H.S.
Or we could just fix the high schools in poor neighborhoods...