Essay Sample on Affirmative Action in College

Throughout America’s existence, there have been minority groups unfairly discriminated against. Put at severe social and economic disadvantages, minority groups had to focus on feeding their families and paying bills with education an afterthought. Even if a minority group member was in a good financial position, colleges were segregated until 1954 so it was near impossible to attend. Though schools became desegregated in 1954, campuses still lacked minority students. Affirmative action was implemented to solve this very issue. Affirmative action is a policy adopted by some colleges which gives admissions preferences to minority students. Today these minority students consist of Black and Hispanic individuals with White and Asian students being the majority. While on the surface, affirmative action sounds like a well-needed step to repair America’s past discrimination, it is in actuality disadvantageous. Affirmative action sabotages all students to who it affects.

The first negative consequence of affirmative action is that it attempts to increase diversity at the cost of non-minority students. Non-minority students are put to a higher standard when being considered for admission into a college solely based on their race. Data collected from the University of Texas showed that the average high school GPA of White and Asian admitted students were 3.04 and 3.07 respectively while the average GPA of Hispanics and African American students were 2.83 and 2.57 respectively (Heriot, 2013). There is a major GPA gap between minority and non-minority students not only at the University of Texas but across all major universities which use affirmative action. It is not fair for non-minority students who have worked hard to reach their peak academic proficiency to be punished simply for the color of their skin. Non-minority students who are rejected from colleges which they academically deserve to be admitted are forced to attend colleges where they will not be properly challenged. If a non-minority student with a GPA of 3.8 is forced to attend a college with an average acceptance GPA of 2.4, they are likely not going to be challenged by their peers and will find the pace of their classes too slow. They will not be pushed to their full potential and society will suffer as a consequence. Not to mention that affirmative action does not take into consideration a student's financial situation either. This means that a low-income non-minority student can be put at an even greater disadvantage than they were before. 

Perhaps the individuals who are harmed the most by affirmative action are the minority students which it affects. Affirmative action allows for underperforming minority students to be accepted to extremely competitive colleges. This would not be a major issue if the underperforming students were slightly below the mean intelligence of their college; however, the evidence indicates the opposite. The underperforming minority students accepted to elite schools have SAT scores hundreds of points below their school’s average SAT score (Sandler and Taylor, 2012). This difference between a student’s academic ability and the demand of their college is called a mismatch. These mismatched students are not able to keep with the fast pace learning of their classes nor are they able to keep up with their properly matched classmates. They fall exponentially behind as their education progresses as their professors will not slow down the pace of the class to meet the needs of a single student. This leads to mismatched students earning lower grades and having a higher dropout rate. There is an abundance of evidence to support this claim. According to Sandler and Taylor, “Black college freshmen are more likely to aspire to science or engineering careers than are white freshmen, but mismatch causes blacks to abandon these fields at twice the rate of whites.”, and “Black law-school graduates are four times as likely to fail bar exams as are whites; mismatch explains half of this gap.” It is clear to see that affirmative action is not helping the minority students it intends to. Instead, it is debilitating those who had the possibility of a bright academic future. A mismatched minority student who is accepted into Harvard will likely fail their classes and be forced to drop out. Their immense student debt which they have incurred will leave them in a worse position than when they started. If that same mismatched student had gone to a less competitive yet still very respectable college, they would have had a much more successful outcome. 

Some would argue that affirmative action is still necessary to increase diversity for the benefit of the college campus. Julia Chaffers argues this exact position stating that “diversity enhances the university experience for all students,” and that “impactful learning in college comes from interacting with peers and learning from people with differing experiences.” While it is true that a more diverse campus leads to an enriched education, affirmative action is not the way we should go about achieving this. As established before, affirmative action leads to the creation of mismatched minority students whose academic abilities are marginally lower than their properly matched classmates. Social interaction becomes an issue for the mismatched as students tend to befriend those who have similar academic abilities to themselves (Sandler and Talyor). This creates an environment where mismatched minority students and their properly matched counterparts befriend each other at lower rates. Thus minority and nonminority students become more segregated as a result of affirmative action. This is the exact opposite of the “diversity” which Chaffers spoke of. The concern then becomes sustaining diversity on campus without the use of affirmative action. Data collected from when UCLA removed affirmative action in 1998 addresses the concern perfectly. While there was a “drop-in minority enrollment as preferences were phased out...The total number of black and Hispanic students receiving bachelor's degrees was the same”(Sandler and Talyor). Diversity on campus did not actually decrease a great deal because those who were being accepted due to affirmative action alone constantly dropped out. The minority students who were accepted into UCLA were properly matched for the college and likely able to form better connections with other diverse students on campus creating true diversity. 

While the intentions of affirmative action are good, its unintended consequences are far from ideal. The underlying systemic inequalities in America need to be addressed, but affirmative action is not the right method.  In fact, affirmative action harms the minority students it attempts to help the most. Not to mention that affirmative action increases diversity at the cost of non-minority students. The victims of affirmative action suffer the consequences of the public’s inability to see past affirmative action’s self-righteous status. This outdated policy has outlived its use and is not for the benefit of any parties involved. Affirmative action sabotages all students who it affects.