Affirmative Action: Why it’s Necessary and Why it’s Broken
This story was written in February 2017 for an AP English Language class with the goal of selecting a topic, collecting resources, analyzing them, and developing an opinion on the topic, then writing an op-ed using the collected sources. It has been reformatted for publication, but the contents have not been edited.
As I make my way towards college applications, I’ve been looking at the various factors used by colleges to determine acceptance. One of the factors a decent amount of colleges use is a policy called affirmative action. While it comes in many forms, the general idea is a policy that tries to lower the bias towards white men in academia in favor of minorities who don’t get as much of a chance. The implementation itself varies from institution to institution, with some having goals for diversity and others just using it as a deciding factor between otherwise equally-matched students. There are genuine flaws with affirmative action and its implementation that need to be addressed, but because of issues with diversity in America and the ostensible goals of the program, affirmative action is a necessary policy to promote further diversity in academia and education as a whole.
Let’s start off with why affirmative action is necessary. The U.S. News & World Report, one of the most prominent authorities on college rankings and statistics, has a measure called the Campus Ethnic Diversity Index, which is a measure of the probability that any two students selected at random at a given university would be of different ethnic groups. The index excludes international students as international students are just reported as such on college diversity reports, but overall the index is a good measure of how diverse a college is. According to the News & World Report’s statistics, the average diversity index of the top one hundred national universities is 0.656, approximately 66%, and the average for the top hundred liberal arts colleges is 0.512, a mere 51%. If that’s the level for the top hundred colleges of each type in the nation, what does that mean for the rest of the thousands across the country? It is important to note that the index applies to all colleges, meaning that, in News & World Report’s words, “historically black colleges tend to score very low on this measure since their student bodies are made up of predominantly one ethnic group” so the statistic is not a direct correlation to levels of minorities in schools, but the point still stands that colleges and universities could afford to be even just a little more diverse. It’s not just schools that have issues with diversity, either. Writing for CNN, journalist LZ Granderson reports that “According to an American Society of News Editors study, minorities make up 12.3% of newspaper staffs and 16.4% of online-only news staffs despite being a third of the general population…minorities filled 12% of the newsroom managerial positions at 295 stations owned by 19 media conglomerates.” It’s important to note that media conglomerates and stations have affirmative action policies in place, and they still can’t manage to have good diversity. It’s clear that something, needs to be done to fix the diversity problem in schools and businesses. However, it seems that affirmative action isn’t even working enough to do that. Let’s take a quick look at why that is.
The biggest issue with affirmative action is how it was implemented originally. While the policy was originally detailed by John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, it was implemented by Richard Nixon with Executive Order 11478 in 1969. The policy worked, to a measure. Within a few years of Nixon’s executive order to implement affirmative action, 57% of male and 72% of female black college graduates had jobs in government positions. However, this is only within percentage of black people who graduated college. Taking a look at the United States Census Bureau’s data for people in poverty between 1965–1974, about five years on each side of Nixon’s executive order, the poverty rate of black people from 1965–1969 dropped from approximately 45% to 35%, but from 1970–1974, the level of black unemployment wavered between about 31% and 33% for the whole of the five years after affirmative action was implemented. The survey has a slight caveat of only starting annual measurements in 1966 and just estimating the rate of poverty between 1960 and 1966, but even the change from 1966 to 1969 is substantially more than from 1970 to 1974. Why is there such a discrepancy between the rate of employment and the poverty rate? The answer lies again in the type of people who were employed; namely black college graduates. The United States Department of Business reported in 1970 that only 36.1% of black people under age 25 had completed high school, and a mere 6.1% had graduated college. When the only people applicable for affirmative action are 6% of the group you’re trying to help, it isn’t going to help the group much as a whole. The issue even happens with affirmative action in colleges with more modern affirmative action policies; only 85.8% of black people and 66.5% of hispanic people graduate high school, so only the people who graduate high school will even have the chance of benefitting from affirmative action. That’s not a functional system, and it needs to be fixed.
How can we fix affirmative action? By applying it earlier in schools. Offering support to students to get into college easier if they’re a minority won’t help if they dropped out of high school because they couldn’t handle it. Instead of putting a filter on the end of the pipeline, put it on the front. In the words of Tanner Colby, who wrote a very in-depth article on affirmative action and its flaws that I highly recommend you give a read, “You integrate the workplace by integrating the high school cafeteria. Or, better yet, the elementary school playground”. If minority students can get into better elementary or middle schools, they have a better chance of not washing out of high school, so they have a better chance of getting into and graduating college, so they have a better chance of getting employed. As affirmative action itself is about organizations where selectivity is involved, you can’t have it in a public elementary or middle school. What you can have, however, are programs that promote diversity in other ways, like easier transport to and from schools for those living in poorer (and not-so-coincidentally, historically blacker) neighborhoods, incentives for public schools to enroll more PoC students, or other policies. With issues in early-school diversity fixed, higher education and the workplace’s issues with diversity can fix themselves as well through both using affirmative action to prevent racial bias towards white people from affecting diversity and from the higher amount of minority students managing to not wash out of high schools and colleges due to the system being built against them. It turns out that the solution to diversity in academics and workplace is to destroy the barrier keeping them from getting there.
Works Cited
“Campus Ethnic Diversity.” U.S. News & World Report. U.S. News & World Report, n.d. Web. 17 Feb. 2017. <http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities/campus-ethnic-diversity>.
Colby, Tanner. “It’s Time for Liberals to Admit That Affirmative Action Doesn’t Work.” Slate Magazine. Slate Magazine, 10 Feb. 2014. Web. 17 Feb. 2017. <http://www.slate.com/articles/life/history/features/2014/the_liberal_failure_on_race/affirmative_action_it_s_time_for_liberals_to_admit_it_isn_t_working.html>.
“Educational Attainment by Race and Hispanic Origin, 1940–2014.” Infoplease. Infoplease, n.d. Web. 17 Feb. 2017. <http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0774057.html>.
Granderson, LZ. “What’s Wrong with Affirmative Action — and Why We Need It.” CNN. Cable News Network, 13 Oct. 2012. Web. 17 Feb. 2017. <http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/13/opinion/granderson-affirmative-action/>.
“Who Is Poor?” Institute for Research on Poverty | University of Wisconsin–Madison. University of Wisconsin-Madison, n.d. Web. 17 Feb. 2017. <http://www.irp.wisc.edu/faqs/faq3.htm>.
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