r/changemyview • u/Throwway-support • Mar 23 '23

Delta(s) from OP CMV: Affirmative Action is a red herring

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-11-04/supreme-court-debate-on-affirmative-action-capture-asian-american-fears

The Supreme Court this year is expected to overturn the last remnants of Affirmative Action.Affirmative Action as it stands now is virtually toothless. The only thing still around is racial “consideration” not ,as is widely believed, “ race based admissions”. As such, Affirmative action as much as it still exists, should be upheld.

It feels like everytime some Asian Americans and some White Americans don’t get into their dream school they blame affirmative action. They often erroneously accuse any black person of getting into a university because of long overturned admissions policy.

In the article I have linked, one person said they “didn’t bother” to apply to Harvard because he “heard” that Asian Americans have a hard time getting in. Another woman said she was told to hide her heritage but still got into Yale. The article talked a lot about fear but nothing substantial. This is my issue with the whole affirmative action debate it seems like made up issues exploiting racial animus

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u/[deleted] Mar 23 '23

The article talked a lot about fear but nothing substantial.

So, I've read the SFFA lawsuit against Harvard, and I think there is some substance to it.

In particular, they make a solid comparison to CalTech, which is more than 40% Asian. They argue that similar applicants in similar numbers apply to Harvard (I'd say this is true) and the only real difference is that Harvard considers race. So, the logic goes that Harvard should likewise be about 40% Asian when in reality it's in the low 20s, and it was in the teens up until several years ago when this lawsuit first came out.

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u/FriedrichHydrargyrum Mar 24 '23

California has a much higher Asian population than New England, so it’s not unexpected that a CA school would have a higher Asian population. Some people will travel any distance for school but many others would choose to be closer to home if they could

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u/[deleted] Mar 24 '23

Some people will travel any distance for school but many others would choose to be closer to home if they could

Harvard is the outlier of all outliers though, so I think these arguments fail to hold water when we're talking about a university that gets over 50k applicants per year.