Affirmative Action Options

[*kryogenix*]

For or against?

I'm against affirmative action. It's simply not fair to deny entry to a college to someone with an astronomical gpa so that someone with a 2.0 gpa can get in just because of their skin color. Racism, pure and simple.

[ComradeRed]

The average student at Harvard has an SAT of 1546 and had a High School GPA of 3.91 unweighted. Do you have that?

Yale, which is even more selective than Harvard, shows an average SAT of 1540 and unweighted GPA of 3.94. 35% of students accepted to Yale have published a major article while in high school. Another 50% have done a substantial research project (defined as over 40 pages and under the advice of an adult mentor).

The percentage of African-American, Native American, and Hispanic students at Yale is 15% -- yet among the top quarter of Yale's class of 2004, only 4% of the students fall into those categories... The bottom quarter of Yale's most recent class was one-third minority... because most of those people were admitted due to affirmative action, and were academically mismatched for Yale, so they all ended up getting low grades and graduating without honors.

I don't have stats for Hispanics, so I used ones for blacks ... but they correspond to roughly the same. Failure rates dropped among all races after affirmative action ended, jsut most of all among blacks.

In later news, Penn's new application has 20+ different "ethnicities" to choose from, PLUS you can fill in your own. Even I checked three boxes, and I'm about as pure-blood as they come. Not surprisingly, "European" is all one big category.