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| | | 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. | |
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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.
| | | Current Status of Affirmative Action in California
With CA’s ban on affirmative action (AA), we’re on a crusade to make America homogenous again. In 2017, Donald Trump had announced the administration'sinvestigation and potential lawsuit against universities who utilize affirmative action policies. He deemed it as a system of intentional race-based discrimination. | | | 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. | |
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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 is this fair? | |
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< | 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!” | >
> | 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.
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?
| | | It doesn’t have to be this way. | | | *
The dean of Wesleyan University stated, in reference to AA, ““I think it’s a fair question to ask: Did we really understand or know what we were doing, or could we have predicted what the issues would be?”. This dean is correct. As we see in the comparison between California and New York, it seems that a state not operating under AA and one that is elicits similar results. This may mean that AA isn't as effective. As a remedial arrangement, AA was shaped over sixty years ago and was not able to be formulated in a way that considered our changing socio, economic, political, and technological advances. All of these attributes relate to the racial gap and its widening, despite valid efforts. Due to the knee jerk reaction of 1960s political scientists and advocates of AA, it may be true that AA was a system that was influenced by "colorblind society" trying to fill quotas. However, this type of framework is dangerous when attempting to achieve racial equality, and we may be seeing this today in the effects of AA. Although the alternatives are costly, such as the lottery systems in Europe, this investigation made it clear to me that the current AA system may not be truly effective, as I once thought. | |
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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. | | | | |
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> | Overall, I think it's clear that this is the right direction for the revision, but there was much work needed that didn't get done. Self-editing practices can be improved: you should have found the mistake about NYU, which would have led to an effort to understand the actual structure of NYC and NYS higher education, which would have led back to the broader picture of the education system of CA. If we are to think creatively about how to make equality in education real for young America, we need to learn more about the parts of the higher education system that your readers here aren't being helped to see. | | |
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