Affirmative Action Essay

“Affirmative action has been one of the most controversial issues in the united states during the last several decades”- James A. Beckman (2004 Affirmative Action, Encyclopedia). In both History and the present, minorities have been dealing with problems such as racial, labor and educational issues. The job of Affirmative Action is creates methods to ensure fair treatment for minorities for each of these issues. In some cases there have been many debates on whether the methods that Affirmative Action implies are the correct ways to ensure fair treatment for minorities especially on higher education. Given education’s importance in a global job market, Affirmative Action is a reasonable method for ensuring the fair treatment of minorities in higher education due to its history of creating opportunities for minorities to compensate for centuries of racial, social, and economic oppression.
First of all, too understand how affirmative action has helped minorities get a higher education; is it wise to understand, what affirmative action is. In the introduction section of Affirmative Action, an encyclopedia, Affirmative Action is defined as a Positive action to improve the participation of members of certain groups in various aspects of society, such as the work force or education. Personal characteristics, such as race or gender; are groups that affirmative action focuses on to help because these groups have historically been subjects to systematic or institutional discrimination. Of course, education is an area that groups of different characteristics have been discriminated against before. Action has been taken to solve discrimination in education because as a matter of fact today public schools are filled with different ethnics gro...

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...m to go against the fourteenth amendment of the United States is called a quota. A quota was used in some of the universities in the United States; it was used for getting admission in those schools. Some universities had a limited of amount of people that were allowed to attend the university and the quota where mainly being hold for minorities.
In addition to this, an example of universities using quotas in history would be the case of Bakke vs University of California (1978). A man named Allan Bakke applied twice to the medical school of the University of California at Davis, and each time he was not accepted. The reason he did not get accepted is because the school had a dual-track admission policy that set aside a fixed number of seats in each entering class exclusively for applicants who claimed membership in certain disadvantaged minority groups