California bans the biggest affirmative action in America. Yes, you are used to those court cases where people argue that black kids, latino kids, etc should not be admitted in universities when there are other more qualified Asian and white kids ahead of them. Even the Supreme Court ruled that “race” cannot evidently be used for admission purposes. Fair game!
Personally, I support affirmative action and I support the thesis that minorities in America (not immigrants like me) deserve an accommodation because if you do check data, the admission system is not that fair. What do I mean? Obama was rumoured to have gotten into Harvard Law via affirmative action, but he graduated top 10% of his class, and served as the president of the law review there.
In other words, any system which will not discover a student, who then needs special help to get in, and end up becoming one of the best graduating students is defective and cannot be relied upon. So, if indeed Obama needed help and ended up among the best, how can you argue that affirmative action is not necessary to fix the discriminatory systems built over centuries in the admission processes?
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They do not care but have continued to support “affirmative wealth” where elite universities admit children of the rich and famous without competition. So, these fighters are happy when “race” is replaced with “wealth”. But there is good news because California has made it illegal: “It will soon be illegal for public and private universities in California to consider an applicant’s relationship to alumni or donors when deciding whether to admit them.”
Understand that more students are admitted based on “wealth” than “race”: “Self-reported numbers showed that in 2022, USC admitted the highest percentage of students with legacy and donor ties of any California university, 14.4 percent. It was followed by Stanford and Santa Clara, where those numbers were 13.8 percent and 13.1 percent respectively.”
But few care, rather, they want to beat down the latino or black kid on campus because 5% of them are on campus. Of course many are not happy with this decision, including those who do not support the use of race in admission. I tell them as they say in Nigeria: go to court!
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Whether it’s based on race or wealth, both are discriminatory, which contradicts the constitution anyway. The institutions that employ affirmative wealth are doing it for financial gains, and once the ban becomes effective, donations will likely reduce.
There’s no admission criteria that will satisfy everyone, so it will remain an eternal debate, since all classes of people didn’t start from the same position. Some had advantages and privileges and are determined to preserve them, while those who had nothing are fighting to break in.
At the end of the day, political solution will be more tenable than judicial pronouncements. It’s now left for the people to figure out workable solutions.