Affirmative Action From University Admissions example essay topic

PRO-AFFIRMATIVE ACTION What is it? Well affirmative action is, in plain text, the consideration of your class, race, gender, color, ethnicity, national origin, and disability when deciding who gets a certain job or admission into a school. If you are amenity applying for a job and there are other people that are applying as well then you will be considered for the job over one of the other people, even if they have more experience. It is not only for jobs, it is also used in any situation that there is a minority or different person, racially or ethnicity, because the particular business or corporation needs to have some minorities working in that business or in that school.

They do this because of a government law or because they wish to add some diversity into their corporation or school in order to give some balance to have a more diverse setting. This strategy does not just work for minorities but also for women who apply to jobs where there are none or where the majority of the employees are white male. Since the US has won the war of discrimination against woman, now more and more places want women to work there in order to do a few things. To add women to the workforce, or to hire women, is to not give a business an image of discriminating against woman for not having any female employees (no author, see work cited #1).

Affirmative action was created to fight the war on discrimination. There are many examples where people of all different color, race, cultural background, ethnicity, or religion have been hired or offered an education where they were previously declined. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 made discrimination illegal and established equal employment opportunity for all Americans regardless of race, cultural background, color or religion. Subsequent executive orders, in particular Executive Order 11246 issued by President Johnson in September 1965, mandated affirmative action goals for all federally funded programs and moved monitoring and enforcement of affirmative action programs out of the White House and into the Labor Department (Kivel, 2).

The California Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI) asked the question: Why should the people of California constitutionally prohibit themselves from ever again taking gender, race, national origin, ethnicity, or color into account in the operation of public employment, education or contracting? I think that even though affirmative action is a good idea, I can not disagree with the CCRI because even though we should not have to go that far to have to bring those kinds of things into the situation. All businesses, schools, etc., should have people of different colors, races, and ethnicity because it gives people a sense of belonging and allows people to make new friends of different origins and to learn from them. I feel that if we ignore the fact that we need people of different race, color, etc., in schools, jobs, etc., and continue to do it "the old way".

Then we will again live in a world of hate and crime like it once was when we did not allow woman or people of different races into our society, as far as schools and businesses are concerned (no author, see work cited #3). Colleges and Universities are still trying to move beyond race-based admissions. In the case of a young woman who applied to the University of Washington who talks about her home life with her father abusing her mother and her mother abusing drugs. This essay from the high school senior impacted the readers into helping to ban affirmative action from university admissions. In February, Florida joined the growing number of states that struck affirmative action from admissions. California in 1996, voters eliminated race-based admissions policies, and the same year, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals did the same in Texas in Hopwood vs. State of Texas.

The University of Massachusetts Amherst and the University of Virginia have elected to significantly reduce the role of race in their admissions policies in anticipation of upcoming court rulings. Unlike the University of Michigan's affirmative action policy which is still under attack in court (Gorman, 1120). When affirmative action is not used to admit students into Colleges and Universities, it is still an effective way to do add diversity. This is because even thought there are laws stating that there have to be minorities admitted to the school, new policies that ban affirmative action are working just as good. The new policies are admitting students of different races and ethnicity's so behind the scenes, sort of speak, affirmative action is at work. Even though race is not considered in the admission process, minorities are coming into the world with "life experience" which are what colleges and universities want.

So in a way there is a type of affirmative action at work. This effort produced mixed results. From to 1980 to 1996, the proportion of African-Americans in the student body declined from 3.7% to 2.9%. On the other hand, the proportion of Hispanics rose from 1.7% to 4% (although this increase may be reflected, in part, by the fact that the racial group Hispanic was defined more broadly by 1996), and the representation of American Indians increased from 1% to 1.2%. By 1997, the university grew nervous as it watched trends in other states, such as Texas and California, so it sought a way to merge the applicant pools in a way that maintained representation from underrepresented racial groups-African Americans, American Indians, Filipinos, Hispanics, and Pacific Islanders. The university's solution was to admit the top two-thirds of the freshman class solely on the basis of academic numbers.

In evaluating the bottom third, the university used a more-extensive review process that combined academic and nonacademic ratings but gave less-explicit emphasis to race (Gorman, 1121). WORK CITED PAGE 1. Affirmative Action, UCLA School of Law Affirmative Action Outreach, Education and Organizing Project. UCLA: 1999.2.

Kivel, Paul. Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice. Philadelphia, New Society Publishers: 19963. UCLA: 1999. Gorman, Siobhan. After Affirmative Action, Washington, National Journal Group, Inc., 2000.