Affirmative Action

In this research proposal I intend to study the views of local college students and high school seniors on affirmative action concerning college admissions. In this study I intend to show that most college students are against affirmative action being used in the admission to colleges, university's, and graduate schools. I plan to show that using race as part of the admission process is looked at as discrimination and does not offer equal opportunity to those non-minority students.

In order to conduct this research we must first fully understand what affirmative action is, Why it is in place, How it works, who it effects, and what results that have come from it? First a history on the matter: Affirmative action is a major issue legally, politically, and socially, especially when it involves higher education admission processes.

Affirmative action was put into place during the civil rights era in hopes of resolving racism, past discrimination, and past segregation. It was intended to make the work force, and higher education institutions a more diverse environment. It was supposed to improve on the noble idea of equal opportunity. But I hope to prove in this study that most young adults feel it has done just the opposite. I want to prove that it has taken away their very equal opportunity that this country prides itself on, and that college students and high school seniors feel that is has caused its own form of discrimination against non- minority students.

Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act applies to student recruitment, admissions, and financial aid programs. The key factors in review of such programs include the following:

1. The use of separate procedures, tracks, criteria, or committees for white or minority students

2. The number and weight of criteria other than race used in such decisions.

3. The availability, race-neutral criteria such as class and geography, and their likelihood of providing similar diversity

4. The relationship of such programs to the stated educational mission of the institution, taking into account its service are and the relevant application pool (http://www.aaup.org).

The most important current cases include challenges to the procedures used at the University of Michigan for both its undergraduate and law school admissions, the University of Georgia, and at the University of Washington law school. The Bakke case remains the Supreme Court precedent applicable nationally on student admissions, although the Fifth Circuit's Hopwood decision (suggesting that Justice Powell's opinion in Bakke, which found that diversity could serve as a compelling interest in higher education to justify the consideration of race in student admissions, is no longer good law) has been used by some other courts to question the continued viability of the diversity rationale from Bakke. After the Fifth Circuit's 1996 Hopwood decision, the state of Texas passed legislation that allows students within the top ten percent of their graduating class at all Texas high schools to be admitted to the University of Texas system. In the wake of Proposition 209, California has also adopted a plan to accept the top 4% of high school seniors in the state to the University of California system. Florida recently followed suit with the One Florida Initiative, which would eliminate the consideration of race in admissions and guarantee admission at the state's public colleges and universities to the top twenty percent of graduating seniors from all Florida high schools.

The U.S. Department of Education has issued policy guidance setting forth the circumstances under which race-targeted financial aid is permissible under Title VI as interpreted by the federal government. This guidance has been reiterated in light of subsequent federal court decisions and has been interpreted by the Department's Office for Civil Rights in many of agency findings, including a decision stating that privately funded "minority scholarships" at Northern Virginia Community College were not justified under Title VI because the College failed to demonstrate that the scholarships were needed for recruitment and retention of minority students, and because the college was involved in the creation of a foundation to administer the scholarships. A race-targeted financial aid program founded to remedy discrimination has also been struck down by a federal court based on the nature and weight of the evidence offered to support it (http://www.aaup.org).

There has been an increased effort in recent years to mount reverse discrimination challenges to university admissions policies around the country. Important recent cases include the following:

1. Hopwood V. University of Texas: This suit was brought in 1992, when four applicants to the University of Texas school of Law filed a case in federal district court alleging that the law schools admission policies were unconstitutional. They claimed that putting African American and Mexican American applicants in a separate pool and accepting members of those groups over non-minority applicants with comparable records violated the equal opportunity clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The district court ruled that separate evaluations for minority applicants were unconstitutional because they were not narrowly tailored to the state's compelling interest in diversity in overcoming past discrimination.

2. LeSage v. University of Texas: In October 1998 the Fifth Circuit revived a lawsuit charging the University discriminated against white applicants to a doctoral program. The court concluded that LeSage would have been rejected under a race neutral admissions policy, and since the challenged affirmative action policy was no longer in use, he had no injury deserving relief. However the Court concluded he would not have to prove that he would have been admitted under a race neutral program, because the relevant injury

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