President Bush last week asked the Justice Department to submit an amicus (friend-of-court) brief urging the Supreme Court to rule against the University of Michigan’s policy of using race as a major admission factor. Under the current policy, racial minority students receive 20 extra points on a 150 point scale. Bush believes that only a race-blind policy will be fair to all students.
Bush has also proposed his own “race-blind” plan for admissions: allowing the top 10 percent of every high school graduating class to be admitted to the state university. He claims that since this plan only looks at academic performance, it gives all students an equal chance of being admitted. This would remove questions about the SAT biases, as well as legacy/donor status influencing admissions officers. However, the implications of this plan would do far more damage to our entire educational system, from kindergarten through college and beyond, than any race-based policy could ever do.
One of Bush’s main attacks on affirmative action is that it results in a quota system, where students are taken simply based on numbers and not on academic qualifications. However, forcing state schools to accept the top 10 percent of a graduating class is no different. If anything, it actually encourages students to stay at failing schools-which flies in the face of what Bush has hoped to do through school vouchers. The plan would encourage segregation: at an economically stratified high school like mine, the top 10 percent was all white, while the school was over 50 percent students of color; those non-white students would have had a better chance of getting into college had they gone to a school with no white students. This again has the opposite effect Bush says he wants, which is, supposedly, more diversity at schools. It is no surprise that in a state with many de facto segregated schools like Texas, the plan did increase minority enrollment in college. However, this does nothing to ensure that the students are academically qualified.
Another reason the students may not be qualified is that the plan completely discourages students to challenge themselves in school. I believe there is already too much of an emphasis on grades, and Bush’s plan gives students zero incentive to take any challenging classes. Students will be too concerned about padding their GPAs to increase their class rank, and will stay clear of really pushing their limits-something I believe colleges should desire from their applicants.
The worst consequence of the Bush plan is that it completely disregards all parts of the college application. SAT scores, difficulty of classes taken, extracurricular activities, interviews, essays, and teacher recommendations all become completely trivial. For example, a student who had no friends, was a total jerk to his teachers and peers and lettered in Nintendo-but got mostly A’s-would automatically get into a state school over a student who was president of his class, did great community service, took really hard classes, was a great athlete, but had a few more B’s. And this plan is supposed to give everyone a fair chance at admission?
While yes, numerically speaking, the Bush plan does create equality (if you agree with the idea of “separate but equal”), it would leave colleges intellectually bankrupt. It will yield a group of students who have no character and who are totally consumed by something that makes no difference in the real world: grades. In applying for any real job, candidates must be screened, have their references checked, and go through an interview. Likewise, we cannot have a purely numeric system or college admission, regardless of race. Affirmative action opens the door for all hard-working students, because it involves reviewing other parts of an application. We cannot reduce four years of someone’s life to a number, nor should we try to.