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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Wharf Rat who wrote (1409022)	7/11/2023 5:47:25 PM
From: Thomas M.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1576926

The other side of affirmative action Thomas Sowell — Jun 5th, 1999 There were 55 black students attending the University of California-Irvine in 1997, before racial preferences and quotas were outlawed. In 1998, that number rose to 71 and in 1999 to 81. This was a total increase of 47 percent in two years. It has been pretty much the same story with American Indian and Mexican-American students. There are now 44 percent more of the former and 67 percent more of the latter at UC-Irvine than there were when racial preferences and quotas reigned. These statistics are radically different from the kinds of numbers we have been seeing and hearing about, where the end of "affirmative action" led to declining minority enrollments at Berkeley and UCLA. Why not at UC-Irvine? Minority students who did not meet the academic standards at Berkeley and UCLA were not "unqualified." Most were well qualified to be in college, but somewhere else. The University of California-Irvine was one of those other institutions where they could be admitted legitimately, without any double standards. The average white high school graduate would not succeed at Berkeley or UCLA - but only the top tier of white students are admitted. It is only minority students who are likely to be admitted to institutions where they are likely to fail. Now that these double standards have been outlawed, the minority students who are no longer being admitted to the big-name universities are going to places like UC-Irvine. That is precisely what critics of racial preferences and quotas have been saying would happen and should happen. Instead of failing at Berkeley or UCLA, these students have a much better chance of succeeding at UC-Irvine or Cal State-Hayward. Instead of having to take sop courses in order to survive at institutions where the pace is too much for them, they can take solid courses elsewhere that will prepare them for a worthwhile occupation or give them a solid foundation for postgraduate work. It should take just one graduating class admitted without academic double standards to expose the fraud of affirmative action. When minority students begin graduating at a higher rate than before and are able to hold their own academically with their white classmates, it should become clear to any fair-minded person that racial quotas were a bad mistake and that equal opportunity makes everybody better off. But those who have been pushing affirmative action all these years do not want their dogmas put to the test and discredited. The Clinton administration is leaning on colleges and universities to keep putting racial body count ahead of academic standards. The U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights recently sent out a booklet which warns that "the use of any educational test which has a significant disparate impact on members of any particular race, national origin, or sex is "discriminatory." In other words, any group that does not score as high as other groups is being discriminated against. Does this make any sense? Different groups have had different test scores all around the world. With or without test scores, they have also had different academic performances. It doesn't matter whether you are comparing Tamils and Sinhalese in Sri Lanka, Chinese and Malays in Malaysia, Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews in Israel or innumerable other groups in other countries, different test scores and different academic performances among groups have been the rule, not the exception. Yet, when the same thing happens in the United States, it is defined as "discrimination." All of this is politics. If you were serious about helping blacks and other minorities, you would try to get them some decent education long before they reached the college level. But that would require upsetting the status quo with things like vouchers. More to the point, it would upset the teachers' union that supplies millions of dollars in campaign contributions to the Democrats. Politicians find it more expedient to sacrifice the education of another generation of minority students and offer the symbolism of getting them into the kinds of colleges where their poor preparation almost ensures that most are going to fail. Minority students need a realistic prospect of succeeding at places like the University of California-Irvine until such time as they get the kind of education that would enable them to succeed at Berkeley and UCLA. If that kind of education means stepping on the toes of the teachers' union, so be it. Thomas Sowell is a fellow of the Hoover Institute. He can be reached at Creators Syndicate, 5777 W. Century Blvd., No. 700, Los Angeles, CA 90045. jewishworldreview.com Tom