Quote:
Originally posted by 33girl:
Last night on 60 Minutes there was a story about affirmative action at the U of Michigan. Their admissions procedures include a scale of points (for example, 12 points for being valedictorian) that automatically gave 20 points to minorities.
The admissions director and I believe the provost repeatedly said that students in a diverse environment learn better, that being in a diverse environment was learning in and of itself, and that this justified their admissions procedures.
To me, this sounded like not only a criticism and/or indictment of predominantly white colleges, but historically black colleges as well.
Hide the sharp objects, and discuss....
|
That's interesting. I never thought of this as being a criticism of predominantly white and predom. black colleges/universities. Interesting.
Well I have to say that I do attend the U of Michigan and I've learned quite a bit about the 2 lawsuits we are facing. You can go to our homepage (
http://www.umich.edu ) to find out more about this if you all want.
Basically, we are being sued for reverse discrimination and unfair admissions procedures due to considering race as a factor of admissions.
As a minority student at UofM, I personally don't see anything wrong with using race as a factor for admissions. But maybe that's me being biased cuz I am a minority. Anyway, the number of minorities at our school is very low! Check this: we have about 30,000 peeps at our school. Of that number, 25,000 are undergrads.
Ok so then when you break down the ethnicities that go there, you get this:
approx. 2300 African Am
approx. 1700 Latino/a
approx. 40-50 Native Am
Asian students are not considered a minority because their numbers are quite large (I don't have the numbers..sorry)
So if you take the total number of minorities--about 4,040-4,050 minorities--substract that from the number of undergrads, you can get an estimate of how many Caucasian students we have. It's quite large! (This also doesn't include the number of international students we have either...I don't know the numbers...sorry again)
Overall, I can say that our school is diverse but not as diverse as I think it can be. Last year the number of Af. Am students dropped like 2% but apparently it went back up this year. The number of Afr. Am students had been on a decline in the past 3-4 years, but it changed this year. So I just think that considering race and using Affirm. Action, etc for admissions is necessary. Otherwise, I'm not too sure how many minorities would be at UofM or any other school if they didn't use it. I honestly think the numbers would drop significantly. It's like this: if people know ahead of time that their college of choice doesn't really want to create a diverse atmosphere in the classroom, then why would they want to be at that school? Hmmm, for me, that would be an issue, but maybe it wouldn't be for others.
Sorry that was long, but I felt I needed to comment since I attend UofM.
[This message has been edited by ZChi4Life (edited October 31, 2000).]