It's worth thinking about this beyond the money— what values does the USA and its people want to stand for? Affirmative action can be viewed as an obstacle to i

It's worth thinking about this beyond the money— what values does the USA and its people want to stand for? Affirmative action can be viewed as an obstacle to individualism and self-determination, but as a boost to multiculturalism and tolerance. Specifically in the context of education, do we want to think of universities as institutions that help people earn more money and affirmative action as the university deciding who _will_ earn more money, or do we want to think of universities as institutions formative of the American zeitgeist, and affirmative action as the university ensuring the zeitgeist involves said multiculturalism and tolerance? My experience, as a foreigner who went to a university in the USA, is that the cost of college leads a lot of students to think of universities as the former— one can't really blame them. Another thing I noticed, and this might be cultural, is that at my university I saw a lot of fear of mediocrity and a very clear idea in students of what their "path path success" was. I came in quite lost and undecided, thinking of college as a place to explore, take different classes, figure what I want to study and what I want to do with my life as I go. Some of my peers seemed to think as college as a step in a grander plan, and were doing internships freshman summer already aiming for a specific job at a specific company after graduation. For people in that mentality it's not hard to see why affirmative action very much matters, and why they might think of it with so much disdain.