Affirmative Action & Qualifications
Should people be based upon qualifications rather than race?
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
|
||
One objection to affirmative action programs is the idea that only "qualifications" should decide admission to college. Presumably, what is meant here is academic qualifications, because any broader meaning could include race as a factor on the argument that some minorities "qualify" for admission in order to alleviate the effects of past racism. Thus, this argument basically takes the position that admission to college essentially becomes a sort of "reward" for those with a strong enough record of past academic performance. Is this a valid argument?
Unfortunately, this objection falls rather flat because few if any colleges today utilize academic qualifications as the only criterion for admission. As a matter of fact, quite a few additional factors can play an important role in whether or not a person gains admission, including athletic achievement, musical or other artistic abilities, extracurricular activities, volunteer efforts, outside work, travel, admissions essays, etc. Unless one is arguing that all of these also be excluded - and I see no justification for doing so - then the addition of further criteria like race, nationality or ethnic background cannot be disputed simply because they are academically irrelevant.
This raises the very good question of just why all of those other factors are taken into consideration by college admissions boards. Why don't they simply rely upon academic achievement? The reason is rather straightforward: college is not simply about tests and grades, nor should it be. College is about learning, and if the college administration is doing things correctly, quite a lot of learning occurs outside the classroom.
Potential students are - or at least should be - admitted based upon two principles: what they can bring to the community, and their ability to eventually take away more than they arrived with. This should take into account, but must not be limited by, their proven academic talent. Students from minority races, ethnicities, and national backgrounds bring cultural and personal experiences largely absent for the majority. Because of this, an affirmative action program which seeks to increase such diversity won't simply exist as a solution for racism; rather, it will exist as an important means for achieving the college's primary moral and educational mission.
Aside from its inconsistency with the facts of college admissions, this objection to affirmative action also suffers from a number of logical flaws. For one thing, it assumes that academic achievement is essentially the same as merit because it starts with the premise that a person with a certain level of past academic performance necessarily deserves admission to a particular college. This deontological position assumes an automatic and necessary primacy for academic performance and involves a significant logical gap because there is no clear connection between academic achievement and merit.
To understand why, consider the analogy of a community which has a single baseball field. According to the argument from achievement, only the best players should be allowed to use the field because they, having the best past performance, most deserve the opportunity to expand their skills there. But why must this be so? Why not make it "first come, first served"? Why not a lottery system? Why not take the position that the ones with the weakest skills are the ones who most need time to practice? There are any number of different ways a community could allot time on the field and athletic achievement is by no means the most obvious or the best.
Another logical problem with this argument is that it seems to imply we would or should have meritocracy in college admissions and society generally if only affirmative action programs would be eliminated. As it was explained above, however, affirmative action is far from the only non-academic factor taken into consideration in college admissions. The rest of society doesn't work solely on merit either, and maybe it shouldn't. Only a few jobs rely solely on qualifications, and quite often it seems that the higher up one goes in terms of power and authority, the less of a factor past qualifications appear to play.
Finally, this criticism of affirmative action tends to assume that meritocracy, or at least something very close to it, will result in a more economically efficient distribution of human resources. When the best qualified people for a job are doing the job, then all jobs will be done better. This is a teleological argument in that it justifies the use of merit as the sole criterion based upon its supposed good consequences; as such, it is valid, but it is inconsistent.
Why? Because it is used to oppose affirmative action which itself is defended teleologically on the argument that it results in positive social consequences. Opponents of affirmative action cannot replace one teleological position with another by simply asserting that the first is "unjust," a deontological assertion which stipulates that something is inherently wrong. If what they really mean is that the consequences are less desirable than the consequences of their own policies, then they must explain how and why their goals are indeed better.
Race & Qualifications
If we were to grant, just for the sake of argument, that academic performance should be the only factor when it comes to college admissions, must we then conclude that taking race into consideration is as unjust as critics of affirmative action claim? Perhaps - but probably not.
It is easy to imagine two students, one who has a better academic record after putting more effort into her studies and one with a worse record after putting less effort into his studies. If the student with a better record is white and the student with a worse record is black, but the latter is admitted due to his race while the white student is denied because no more positions are left, then this would appear to be a situation where the critics are right: an injustice has occurred.
Unfortunately for critics, this scenario is more theory than the reality of affirmative action. It is surely one which can occur and, perhaps, one which will become less theoretical over time as minorities are able to improve their socio-economic position in society. The question that needs to be answered here is: why does there exist a disparity in qualifications in the first place?
The fact of the matter is that for a minority student with worse academic achievement, the problem is often not because she put in less effort and time in her schooling. Instead, the reasons tend to stem from the legacies of slavery and racism in American society: worse schools, worse family incomes, worse parental education, etc.
Consider the following analogy: I and some other people in my neighborhood run a race together to see who is the fastest runner in the community. Unbeknownst to anyone (including myself), a very crabby neighbor puts weights in the shoes of everyone but me. We run the race and I come in first, doing a mile in four minutes. Now, I obviously earned that time because I ran really well - but does that mean that I earned getting first place in the race? Did I now deserve to be called "fastest runner in the community"?
Certainly not. The placement of the weights was in no way my fault, but I did benefit from them inadvertently. In an ideal race there would be a link between earning a particular score (or time) and earning a rank in comparison to others - but this was not an ideal race. We don't know what the other runners would have done had they not been handicapped from the beginning, and that means that my rank relative to them has not been earned, even though my actual running time was definitely earned.
Does this have any relevancy to whether affirmative action programs are just or not?
Definitely. Although the white student has earned his qualifications, he has not necessarily earned having a better rank relative to other college applicants. The difference between the two students either has nothing or has very little to do with the actual merit of the higher ranked student. Although the white student may have some claim on a position in school, he does not necessarily have a just claim to be admitted instead of the black student solely on the basis of better academic scores.
Thus, if a school admissions board refuses to take race into consideration in situations such as this, then an injustice is occurring because the white student is being permitted to benefit (quite inadvertently) from past racism and slavery. On the other hand, if the admissions board takes race into consideration, then that is just because a more level playing field is created among the various applicants.
Sometimes this could result in rejecting a white student whose superior scores were wholly earned, and hence we would be faced with an injustice. Is this a reason to reject affirmative action programs? Although this may be tempting to some, it would be an invalid move because it is self-contradictory to abandon a program due to ill effects when that abandonment will result in even more of the same ill effects, namely injustice.
More than that, there is some question as to whether or not the elimination of affirmative action programs really would result in much of an increase in justice. In 1998, William Bowen and Derek Bok (former presidents of Princeton and Harvard, respectively) published their findings of a study of affirmative action in a book entitled "The Shape of the River." They examined the records of over 45,000 students at elite universities and found that without affirmative action, the chances of white students to be admitted would increase only very slightly: from 25% to 26.2%.
At the same time, they also found that affirmative action programs did quite a lot to benefit minority students. Minorities were not only more likely to be admitted to these universities in the first place, they were also much more likely to go on to professional and graduate school than their white counterparts and they were more likely to become community leaders later on.
It is true that we have a duty to pursue justice and avoid injustice, but if both the presence and the absence of affirmative action programs result in injustice, then the only way to reach a conclusion is to compare the relative levels of injustice - and it seems clear that whatever injustice affirmative action programs may cause, they are more than offset by the justice they promote and the injustice their absence would entail.
Over the course of time, the principle of leveling the playing field will probably be best maintained by not focusing on race, but rather on the socio-economic status of the family. This is because we hope that eventually the average status of racial minorities will be about the same as everyone else in society; therefore, the best way to level the playing field between the privileged and underprivileged will be to look at things like family income and geographic location. It won't be perfect, just as racial considerations today aren't prefect, but on average taking such factors into account will result in more justice than injustice.
-->