Another Response to YCT’s Anti Affirmative Action Bake Sale
In case you missed the fiasco last week in west mall, the Young Conservatives of Texas group at the University of Texas held a bake sale in protest of affirmative action. The group sold baked goods at different prices depending on your ethnicity and gender with Asian males being the most expensive and Native Americans not even being charged at all.
The group did this in opposition to the university using affirmative action in admissions process. I understand the satirical attempt at drawing attention to their cause but their efforts lead to a lot of controversy, yelling and very upset and offended students, and I am one of them.
For starters, there is a lot more wrong with the University of Texas admissions process besides the use of affirmative action. The group claimed that they think people should be judged by their merit as opposed to ethnicity and gender upon being accepted into the university however, in most cases ethnicity and gender have nothing to do with the decision of admittance. The university in large part only accepts students who are in the top 7-8% (varies per year) of their high school class regardless of race or ethnicity. Also, so long as you are in the top of your class you will be guaranteed admissions regardless of what your grades actually are which is extremely unfair and not a good representation of whether or not a student should be accepted. My reasoning for saying this is because some high schools are very competitive so being in the top 7-8% required a lot more effort. For instance, I had a 4.0 in high school but was two people out of the top 10% of my high school, but I know if I had gone to a different high school in my hometown I would have been ranked a lot higher than I was at my own. So in reality the only actual admissions decisions are for transfer students (not in the CAP or Paced programs), out of state/international students, non ranking schools, and graduate students.
So, if it were true that the university looks at ethnicity and gender when deciding if they were going to accept students, I should have been accepted being a hispanic female, but I was not accepted. I got into the CAP program and had to spend a year at the University of Texas at San Antonio before I got the chance to come here. What actually bothered me about not being initially accepted into the university was not that other minority students got admitted and I didn’t, it was that other students with lower grades than me got in and I didn’t. YCT missed the mark on trying to protest affirmative action in the admissions process because realistically, most students attend UT were admitted as freshmen, were Texas residents and were in the top 7-8% of their class and were therefore automatically admitted to the university completely independent of their ethnicity and gender. Furthermore, Asian and White students make up almost 2 thirds (62.3%) of the student population which is higher than all other ethnicities combined. This leads me to think that affirmative action in the admissions process is not the problem that should be being protested. If the YCT is actually concerned with flaws in UT’s admissions process they should be protesting against the top 7-8% automatic acceptance policy.
Since there seems to be more compelling issues with The University of Texas’s admissions process it leads me to just be offended with the YCT’s stunt. As a hispanic female, I do not feel as though a “different set of standards” was used to decide if I should be admitted to this institution, and I believe strongly that there was not a different set of standards placed on me when deciding my admittance. I know that I worked hard to get here. It is offensive to the students who do go here because the YCT made it seem as though they think minorities don’t deserve to be here when in reality we all worked extremely hard to get into Texas’s flagship university. It is also disappointing to see fellow Longhorns putting others down because of their ethnicity. I respect the YCT for protesting things they believe in however, they could have gone about this in a less offensive way. What starts here is supposed to change the world, but if offending students is the YCT’s idea of positive change then those aren’t the kind of changes I want to see in the world.