The Pros And Cons Of Affirmative Action

The effort to foster an equal playing field in our education system for everyone is a noble cause, yet in reality, this cause has proven to be divisive and ineffective. To put it simply, affirmative action is an utter failure that creates far more harm than it does equality. Years of research have underlined the fact that affirmative action has done little to reverse racial inequality and has only furthered the issue by challenging the true meaning of equality for all. Beyond a doubt, the primary failure of affirmative action is accepting minority students, solely because of their ethnicity, into schools that, frankly, they should not have been accepted to. Their grades often do not represent the university’s requirements, and therefore, students cannot succeed or compete against their more accomplished peers. The harsh reality is that these students would have flourished at a less competitive institution that reflected their actual grades and test scores. To put this into context, take the University of Texas for example, the average black student who received racial preference scored in

Even more alarming than this, black students are twice as likely to abandon a science, technology, engineering or math degree due to the fact that they were placed into schools they could not compete at. Studies have shown that despite the fact black and minority students fail out of STEM degrees at a higher rate, they are more interested in these fields than white students. Minority and black students would like to pursue degrees in STEM, yet they’re placed against students who out pace them academically, making it nearly impossible for them to achieve. Affirmative action has facilitated in advancing the gap between races because it fails to place students into colleges where they can actually