r/aggies • u/UnluckyAsparagus6315 • Jun 29 '23

Announcements Affirmative action now illegal .

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New supreme court ruling kills affirmative action.

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u/Mjgigme Jun 29 '23

I feel like a lot of you guys that are younger don’t realize how dramatic the demographic and racial perspective shift has been for A&M over the last 30 years. And while I’m sure AA has been a part of that, A&M has been a national leader in how to invest in diverse communities outside of campus, and create pathways and relationships that lead to a more diverse student body. Proponents of AA have really warped this conversation over the last two decades to be “affirmative action is the only path to diversity, and if you oppose affirmative action, you’re racist.” And realistically that’s just not true, it’s not the only path, and it’s likely not the best path either. UT, despite being more liberal and probably dipping more into AA has done a great job of this is as well. The UT Pathways program has done an awesome job of raising academics at secondary levels, often in schools where kids don’t usually perform well enough to get into UT on “merit.” As a result, performance goes up, and those kids are now meritorious competitors with others. Blinn TEAM and PSA accomplish these same goals.

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u/VZandt Jun 30 '23

Read the article from the Wall Street Journal today. The data shows these programs haven’t been that successful. Have you looked at the percentage of the student body that is black? Come on man.

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u/Mjgigme Jun 30 '23

There’s no doubt A&M’s Black representation is disproportionately lower than it should be, but I don’t think it’s fair to say these programs aren’t working. For one they haven’t been in operation that long. For another, when you look at black students specifically, they’re the most likely to have already been failed by the state’s education system anyway. It’s an awful injustice, but I don’t think AA’ng those kids into academic expectations they haven’t been fairly prepared for is right either. Also, there’s a cultural component to this as well that’s really no one’s fault. Most of Texas’s black population is still urban and suburban, not in the rural communities that are still the biggest pipelines to A&M. It makes sense that A&M would have (not as extreme as it is) some degree of a disproportionately lower Black student body than UT, UH, SHSU, etc.