NYU is a private university, with absolutely no relationship to the public higher education systems of New York City or New York State. You say nothing in this draft about SUNY or CUNY, which are the correct comparands to the UC system.

This text does not match the heading. There is no actual description of how UC campuses conduct their admissions systems so as to comply with Prop 209 while building the classes they want. No sources of any relevant kind are cited, so no facts are made available to the reader; the only reference is to a blog post about a tangentially related subject. Some serious work is needed here.

How does the forced transfer of the Cherokee people to Oklahoma in the 19th century affect the admissions practices of the University of California? Wouldn't a reference to Native Californians be more appropriate? In which case, would reservation conditions be the relevant point?

California’s public universities are saying to underrepresented applicants, “Despite shocking inequalities of opportunity, we’re still going to evaluate everyone the same. Good luck!”

California's public universities are not just the UC. There are also the Cal State system and the community colleges to consider. They are collectively much more responsible than the UC system for the education and social uplift of working-class, immigrant, first-generation college and other "marginalized" young people and returning students. The reader of this essay should learn something about them, too, I think. To characterize their admissions practices this way is completely inaccurate, because their learning opportunities are not competitively allocated. So why wouldn't it be right to describe the actual behavior of the system split between a small collection of "selective" institutions and two much larger structures of "open access" institutions?

What this section needs is information. Your "comparison" of outcomes between NY and CA depended on a mistake about NYU and took no account of the actual public higher education systems of each state. No outcome information of any kind was referenced, not even a way to find basic statistical information about how many people graduate from the various higher education institutions of the two states, what the demographic distribution of the graduates is, or what happens to them.

NYU was recently hailed for admitting its most diverse undergraduate class (2023) in history, with 12% Black and 22% Latinx. However, is this rate all that good and does it demonstrate affirmative action is really working? When you look at the state of New York higher education, white students still occupy more than the majority (52%). This reality seems shocking when considering that, unlike California, New York has no barriers to affirmative action. I will next discuss the current status of California's affirmative action system.

I think there are two possible routes to substantive improvement here.

First, most of the statements made about California in this draft would be more or less directly transferable to any discussion about any other state's situation in its higher education system. Two elements are present in California's context that are relevantly special: the Prop 13 limits on the use of property taxes in financing public education, and the Prop 209 prohibition on race-conscious decision-making in, among other roles, public education. Prop 13 took California from among the highest ranked states in public education outcomes to among the lowest. After a quarter century under the effects of Prop 209, comparative effects should also be visible in relation to states, like NY, with large public higher education systems and no barrier to affirmative efforts to include all the public in the state's system of higher education. We are now half a century into the open enrollment system in the City University of New York, and that too might provide relevant points of comparison.

Second, I think the draft can be improved by more carefully separating the goal, which—as you point out in an opening illustration that can be compressed—is the attainment of real social and economic equality from the remedial means, referred to as "affirmative action," largely developed in the 1960s. Although critics in the libertarian and socially conservative strands of American political conversation often decry "equality of results" instead of "equality of opportunity," the actual purpose of public education is precisely to achieve equality of outcome. Every child in society should have an equal education at the public's expense, and that education should be sufficient to offer all children the knowledge and skills they want to acquire to suit them for the lives they want to have. Continuing education should be equally available to all citizens throughout their lives, priced according to their individual ability to pay, so as to offer all an equal opportunity to learn, to think and publish, and to retrain and reskill themselves as they see fit. We can be sure that this level of acceptance of the public sphere's duty and value to the people will not be realized in my lifetime, though it could be in yours. In the meantime, we not only competitively allocate places in the higher educational system, but we do so on the basis of plainly unjust failures to provide equal primary and secondary education. Those unjust inequalities subsist in relation to historical inequalities of many sorts, as well as presently-existing social discrimination systems in a society becoming rapidly more unequal in distributions of income and wealth.

Naturally, remedial arrangements shaped sixty years ago in the then-existing social and technological context will have some continuing value now, and likewise they will be largely outmoded and in need of replacement. Fighting with the "colorblind society" advocates over "quotas" and "preferences" might not be worth it in an information society context. UC as a whole and its component campuses can use far more advanced data-modeling systems to admit their students, in which a large number of components none of which are prohibited under Prop 209 are combined to create admissions profiles. Such a system could produce precisely the admissions distributions that make each class representative of California, without running afoul of Prop 209 or judicial rulings to similar effect. Or, like social democracies in Europe such as the Netherlands, we could conduct lotteries among all applicants for the fixed number of available places. (This is more equal, but in other respects more socially costly than the much more flexible US public higher education systems.) Focusing on the desired social outcome enables remedial creativity, which is both tactically and strategically important.

The topic we all think we understand: Affirmative Action

Introduction

Olympic runners Usain Bolt, Leo Manzano, and Galen Rupp walk to the starting line of their race. The gunman signals; they take their mark. 10 seconds pass; the gun goes off. It is time for all to run to the finish line, right? Wrong. Bolt is Black and Manzano is Latino; both are underrepresented minorities. They must wait for Rupp, their Caucasian peer, to go first, make his laps around, and usurp all the benefits. Time passes, which feels like a century, and it’s finally Bolt and Manzano’s turn to run in this race of inequity. While running, their feet are shackled by chains that accompany their status as underrepresented minorities in America. They are weighed down by redlining, the school-to-prison pipeline, and police brutality. But, they are expected to perform just as well as Rupp who not only started before them, but ran in the absence of impenetrable obstacles. Welcome to California’s Public Higher Education system: the race with the inherently unequal playing field.

As a native East Coaster, it may seem odd that I am writing about CA’s education system. However, I have known since high school that I ultimately plan to move to and build my roots in California following law school graduation. Due to my plans to build a family in the Golden State, I first desired to research about the state’s relationship to race and education.

I was disappointed.

Current Status of Affirmative Action in California

But it’s not.

AA simply provides equitable access to underrepresented and historically oppressed groups.

Instead of remedying historical race-based maltreatment, CA’s public universities overlook its applicants’ hardships. UCs ignore how the G.I. bill’s exclusion of black veterans still negatively impacts African-Americans’ ability to accumulate wealth and intergenerational mobility. While applying to a UC, I, an African-American, would be evaluated against overrepresented applicants who attended elite boarding schools, had private tutors, and have run in this race that I am just starting in.

How is this fair?

Thanks to the Trail of Tears, a Native-American student is unable to remedy the burdening plights of her reservation, no matter how grand the efforts. She does not have the resources to take the SATs multiple times, establish non-profits, or participate in numerous extracurriculars, like other applicants. However, UC schools do not care. California’s public universities are saying to underrepresented applicants, “Despite shocking inequalities of opportunity, we’re still going to evaluate everyone the same. Good luck!”

It doesn’t have to be this way.

AA, if implemented by Senator Hernandez's SCA-5 bill, would have permitted consideration of race and its accompanying disadvantages in UC admissions. It would have given a chance to the students whose ancestors only knew a life of subjugation. But, opposition killed SCA-5 as CA’s conservatives and Asian-Americans broadcasted AA’s “reverse discrimination” shuts the door on them, but opens it for “unqualified” minorities.

But it doesn’t. Affirmative action would help all, including its greatest opponents: Asian-Americans.

Affirmative action would help all, including its greatest opponents: Asian-Americans.

Conclusion

Paper Title

-- By MaryamAsenuga - 11 Apr 2021

Section I

Subsection A

Subsub 1

Subsection B

Subsub 1

Subsub 2

Section II

Subsection A

Subsection B

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