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You know what's funny? The entire college acceptance system is biased toward wealthy families. You need to have the right experiences (often bought with money

You know what's funny? The entire college acceptance system is biased toward wealthy families. You need to have the right experiences (often bought with money, inordinate amount of time spent by parents, or both). You need to write your own letters, of course, with "help" by parents or professionals. You need to plan your courses years beforehand, again, with help by others. If your parents are working their asses off to make ends meet, you likely won't have much help. The entire American system is set up to make it as easy as possible for wealthy kids to go to college. Somehow I've yet to hear one wealthy family objecting "This hurts my kid, because he is completely able to enter college on his own, but thanks to the system it will look like he got in only because he's wealthy! Make the system more fair!" Anybody who says Affirmative action actually "hurts" disadvantaged kids had better be able to explain the above discrepancy. I'm OK with Affirmative action.

prepend 9y ago
This is an interesting argument, but the article doesn’t say this at all. The complaint isn’t that affirmative action helps recipients, but that it hurts Asian Americans. I suppose there are some people arguing against you, but it may be more productive to argue the point at hand. Or at least we can all nod and agree that the net gain to recipients of affirmative action outweighs any negatives. And move on to the lawsuit’s question of “Why should Asian Americans suffer?” I completely agree with your point about wealth being very important. But it’s not a good analogy to affirmative action based on some races. I’ve spent a bit of time in Ivy League schools and it’s still wealthy minorities who are the main benificiary of affirmative action. So wealth is a given for admission regardless of if you’re pro-AA or anti-.
threatofrain 9y ago
But it sounds like all your complaints are about classism. Why not then look classism straight in the eye, rather than punishing young Asians looking to get into college?

prepend 9y ago

This is an interesting argument, but the article doesn’t say this at all. The complaint isn’t that affirmative action helps recipients, but that it hurts Asian Americans. I suppose there are some people arguing against you, but it may be more productive to argue the point at hand. Or at least we can all nod and agree that the net gain to recipients of affirmative action outweighs any negatives. And move on to the lawsuit’s question of “Why should Asian Americans suffer?” I completely agree with your point about wealth being very important. But it’s not a good analogy to affirmative action based on some races. I’ve spent a bit of time in Ivy League schools and it’s still wealthy minorities who are the main benificiary of affirmative action. So wealth is a given for admission regardless of if you’re pro-AA or anti-.

threatofrain 9y ago

But it sounds like all your complaints are about classism. Why not then look classism straight in the eye, rather than punishing young Asians looking to get into college?