The Role of Race in College Admission and the Importance of Equal Opportunity Regardless

Category: Discrimination, School
Last Updated: 28 Feb 2023
Pages: 3 Views: 72

Making a Case For Equal Opportunity Disregarding Diversity Everyone deserves an equal and fair chance when applying to college campuses. Affirmative action creates tension among races in college campuses in an already divided country. I believe that affirmative action does nothing but divide society into separate groups based off of race, class, and ethnicity. This division harms us rather than helps us and will be detrimental in the long run. The college admissions process should be blind and America should provide equal opportunity for everyone.There is no denying that there should be equal opportunity, but the equal opportunities for students. Can occur without the affirmative action programs presently created. Affirmative action programs are made so that all groups within a given society or group have the same opportunity to succeed. A campus wants to be diverse but there is no guarantee that they are allowing diversity through the right methods. There have been many controversies regarding diversity on college campuses throughout time.

In Deena Prichep's article, "A Campus More Colorful Than Reality: Beware That College Brochure". We get an inside look on how a student from the University of Wisconsin. Was photo shopped onto a college brochure in order to ensure that the college represented diversity in full form. Colleges pride themselves on having a wide variety of students from various races. And cultures but just what lengths are they willing to go to in order to showcase that? Diallo Shabazz, the student who was photo-shopped. States that, "Universities have a responsibility to portray diversity on campus. You know and to portray the type of diversity that they would like to create". (678) Due to this overwhelming responsibility on creating a diverse campus, colleges have unfairly allowed students of minority groups to enter their college despite having lower grades and or scores compared to white or more privileged students. This unfair system that is used during college applications is not something that a college should pride themselves on and does not give them the opportunity to claim themselves as being diverse because it is ultimately for the wrong reasons.

No groups of people are uniformly disadvantaged and the truth of the matter is that there are certain people of minority that may be better off than others. In the article, "The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality", Walter Benn Michaels argues his point on cultural diversity and how, "Almost everything we say about culture (that the significant differences between us are cultural, that such differences should be respected, that our cultural heritages should be perpetuated, that there's a value in making sure that different cultures survive) seems to me mistaken". (726)

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Relating to that point, I believe that if we give more attention to affirmative action we are furthermore provoking economic inequality and the gap between the rich and the poor, Michaels claims that, "For thirty years, while the gap between the rich and the poor has grown larger, we've been urged to respect people's identities - as if the problem of poverty would be solved if we just appreciated the poor. From the economic standpoint, however, what poor people want is not to contribute to diversity but to minimize their contribution to it—they want to stop being poor. Celebrating the diversity of American life has become the American left's way of accepting their poverty, of accepting inequality". (727) We are told that cultural diversity is good for us but the differences in race, culture, and identity distract us from the main issue at hand--that there is a gap between the rich and the poor and there is a disadvantage between the two.

People have begun to correlate and intertwine race with inequality, therefore, affirmative action in itself is used to simply help minorities financially.

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The Role of Race in College Admission and the Importance of Equal Opportunity Regardless. (2023, Feb 15). Retrieved from https://phdessay.com/the-role-of-race-in-college-admission-and-the-importance-of-equal-opportunity-regardless/

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