– #DearAbby, a slam poem by Donovan Livingston & Michael Lee-Wolf
With the ongoing presidential election, public and higher education have been highly debated topics. One of the more disturbing opinions I’ve heard is from people who believe that if tuition is made cheaper or completely free, the value of a college education will decrease. Because most jobs nowadays require at least a bachelor’s degree, we’re essentially pricing out the middle and lower classes of the education they need to join the workforce and, consequently, shrinking our consumer base. Pricing college as a luxury when it’s a necessity is not only morally wrong but economically short-sighted.
From this debate about college accessibility, Affirmative Action (AA) has inevitably come to the forefront as a point of contention. AA refers to policies of organizations, businesses, and institutions that are intended to act as safeguards against prejudice based on gender, age, sexual orientation, and race/ethnicity.
Some people claim AA, especially regarding college admissions, is discriminatory towards white Americans. The policy has been in the spotlight recently due to the #StayMadAbby hashtag, targeting Abigail Fisher and racial privilege. Fisher, a white American female, sued the University of Texas when she was a high school senior in 2008 and whose case has made the circuit to the Supreme Court for the second time in December 2015. Fisher believed she would have been admitted had it not been for students of color whom she believes were accepted over her because she is white.
This case is important for two reasons:
One, it illustrates how a lot of prejudice is based on misinterpretations; Abby was actually rejected from UT because her “grades and test scores were not good enough for her to be admitted even in the absence of preferences for black and Hispanic applicants” (Somin 2015). The university accepted 47 students with worse scores than Fisher, 42 of whom were white. It’s particularly interesting to note, “UT rejected 168 black and Latino students with scores equal to or better than Fisher’s” (Bouie 2015). Additionally, Supreme Court Justice Scalia’s commentary on the case illustrates how high up racial prejudice still exists in public institutions. During the justices’ oral arguments, he claimed “there are those who contend that it does not benefit African Americans to get them into the University of Texas… as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school, a slower-track school where they do well” (Devega 2015), giving rise to the clap back campaign #StayMadAbby.
– #DearAbby, Donovan Livingston & Michael Lee-Wolf
Two, Abby’s case brings up the question of whether race/ethnicity should be considered at all in college admissions; shouldn’t people get accepted or rejected based on their academic merit alone? Ideally, the answer is of course. Of course we should be judged based on our performance for college acceptance, for jobs, insurance rates, salaries, and real estate. Yet, everyday, people of color in America are judged and disadvantaged in all these areas and more. AA is an unfortunate but necessary safeguard against systematic discrimination, which does still exist in today’s society. Tozer and Senese (2013) write that reforming American schools was a crucial step to “help forestall permanent class stratification” (p.232) during the Great Depression. Similar social reproduction can be observed in today’s economy, and AA is a modern reformation that performs the same service. Excellence and equality are absolutely compatible ideals in education, and keeping college accessible is not only possible, but the morally right thing to do, as well as necessary in order to prevent the collapse of the American economy.