Affirmative action refers to policies and practices aimed at increasing opportunity for groups that have historically faced discrimination, particularly in education and employment. For the most part, affirmative action has been based on race, but that doesn’t mean it has to be. In the arguments below, race will be a major thing alluded to but affirmative action can be on many other factors. Why should we have it? 1. Affirmative Action Helps Enter Better Students Into Campus. - Two applicants can be on seemingly equal footing, but one has experienced great degrees of oppression, discrimination, and comes from a poorer background, meaning they had to build more skills, tenacity, discipline, and more even with ”equal footing.” Affirmative action helps enter these people onto campus when they might not have before, actually helping better students get onto campuses. - **Conservative Counterargument:** Merit should be the primary standard. While adversity can build character, universities should focus on measurable academic and extracurricular performance rather than trying to guess how much hardship someone has endured. Affirmative action assumes a victimhood narrative. It presumes that minority students are always disadvantaged, when in reality, many minority students come from affluent backgrounds, while many White and Asian students come from poor and difficult circumstances. You are more than your race. Your personal experience should be prioritized. - Merit is still the primary standard. The greater adversity many people from disadvantaged backgrounds face gives them greater merit even if on seemingly “equal footing” as students less disadvantaged. Of course, not all minority students are disadvantaged. That’s why other factors are taken into account. But to ignore race entirely seems like a foolish thing to do simply because it’s not always the most relevant characteristic to a persons merit. In addition, race *does* affect personal experience. Implicit biases exist in society whether you like it or not. Studies show blacker sounding names on resumes tend to be systematically discriminated against. These implicit biases will not be fixed if we don’t make things more equitable in society. - **Conservative Counterargument:** Students will have low self-esteem by being let into a place they don’t feel they deserve. Other students will resent them. Does this happen though? Do students who got let in go to sleep every night and think about their disadvantage. Do other students bully other students for having got in just for their race? - In addition, there are many other values of looking at race aside from just merit, as we get to in the next argument. 2. Diversity Helps Campuses - A. There is a problem of diversity in minority groups in U.S. Universities today. But enrollment rates were not equal among racial and ethnic groups: 89.9% of Asian students; 66.9% of White students; 63.4% of Latino students; and only 50.7% of Black students moved on to postsecondary studies. - B. Scientific research conducted since this Court’s decision in Fisher II reaffirms that the experience of discrimination, prejudice, and underrepresentation negatively impacts racial and ethnic minority students and inhibits academic success. Tokenism, social identity threat, prejudice and discrimination all lead to these problems. - C. Higher diversity on campuses would benefit all students. Implicit and explicit biases can be reduced through increased diversity. Scientific research has found that exposure to diversity enhances critical thinking and promotes deeper information processing, the objective review of information, and problem-solving skills. Campus diversity also improves student satisfaction and motivation, general knowledge, intellectual self-confidence, and productive and cooperative communication and collaboration skills. - **Conservative response:** I can see how diversity perspectives could be valuable—takes sip of red wine and tips Texan hat. But using DEI factors as a proxy for this diversity makes assumptions about individuals' perspectives based on their background. A Black student from an affluent suburb and a White student from rural Appalachia may have very different life experiences that don't align with DEI generalizations. In addition, there should be other important factors regarded aside from just DEI factors like race. Quotas are bad. - A black student from an affluent suburb still has valuable insight about connecting with ones culture, still be ostracized from certain groups, facing disconnect between parental and peer expectations, and more. Diverse rich people perspectives is also important as they are not a monolith. A poor white kid should also be helped—with additional affirmative action for affluence, if anything, but without the need to eliminate racial affirmative action. Of course other characteristics should be considered. That’s why race isn’t the only factor looked at. We should also look at socioeconomic status, grades, extracurriculars, essays, and more. - **Conservative Response:** How do we measure who to admit and how not? We know quotas aren’t allowed. - Use race as one variable among many to weight an applicants profile. Affirmative action doesn’t mean using race or other DEI factors as a free card entry anywhere. It means recognizing how it has played an influence in the holistic profile of an applicant. Just because we can’t easily measure how much to weight it since it’s so complicated doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take it into account. We have many other measures we know are important but can’t explain how to measure fully, like the World Happiness Index. Yet there are many things we know contribute to those measures even if they are hard to objectify, like creating better more intimate relationships. Same with bettering critical thinking and open mindedness with diversity. Having more diverse candidates will obviously better this. 3. Diversity Helps Society - A. Society inherently thrives when the populace has good problem solving and crisis skills— allowing it to deal with short term catastrophe and create long term growth. This is why a population (particularly the majority group) with better skills of this nature are safer and better off. - Critical thinking skills are best built by integrating non-homogenous information consistently into one’s information bank. This is because practice in fitting irregular information into your existing world view forces you to engage in a lot of mental flexibility. It’s a thing you have to learn and a diversity of opinions is one of the best way to ensure students encounter this. - Diversity of race, socio-economic status, and more contributes to diversity of opinion by way of that fact that on aggregate, most places with any degree of a minority community (and therefore by definition where most minorities probably are from) have students with varied cultural backgrounds. Especially for students that bridge that gap into classic white American culture, they are actually forced to really grappled with different ideas and can bring more outside the box thinking to classrooms. - **Conservative Counterargument:** Aren’t there other proxies for diversity? What about religious, political, and philosophical diversity? Universities don’t seem to care about that as much considering conservatives in higher education are much harder to find. - Of course, that’s why other factors are considered in admissions. The reason those groups aren’t weighted as much is because in aggregate they don’t have as much basis in historical disadvantage compared to some other DEI factors. There is a good argument to be had that there should be more conservatives especially on campus and cancel culture should be less bad but that’s another issue. - B. Society that has more people from diverse backgrounds in places of power is also better off. This Is because you have people in power with more flexible and creative thinking interacting and compromising with those from more traditional thoughts. College leads to better career/power outcomes. - **Conservative Counterargument:** Representations in power should be based on merit, not DEI factors. Do you want incompetent leaders in power simply because of something like their race? - This assumes someone gets put in power solely for their DEI factors. Again, there are many factors that comprise DEI. And often, they holistically can mean a politician with stronger merit because of the hardship they have had to endure even ignoring all the other positive factors of differing perspectives and critical thinking. - C. Role models for minorities is important for children who wish to achieve ambitious things, and with more inspired children, society is composed of better adults down the line. - Role models come from college backgrounds frequently - Role models inspire children because when you are trying to model a lifestyle, the more that there are clear guidelines that line up with the details of a child’s life like their cultural background, race, and gender, the better chance that child has of following that path. Adapting a different background to someone’s path is harder and creates more friction against that path, both because the child is confused and also because having tailored instructions will inherently be more likely to work. Things like work-life balance, spirituality, and more will affect your way of living and if you never see (for example, if you’re a Muslim) someone balance religious practice with a competitive field or leadership position, you’ll never know how or have to make it up yourself. 4. Affirmative Action Helps Address Systemic Racism - History in the United States and many other countries has systematically disadvantaged certain social identities and combinations of social identities. A great example in the U.S. is blacks. Slavery and it’s aftermath, Jim Crow laws, housing discrimination through redlining, exclusion from GI Bill benefits, segregation from better schools, and limited access to mortgages and wealth building opportunities has systematically put blacks at a disadvantage for building generational wealth, building a steady income, getting and education, and so much more. Even with everyone being literally equal under the law today, the historical effects remain to this day. Studies show people are intuitively racist even if they don’t mean to be. Helping make the playing field more equitable can heal these intuitive biases. Therefore, DEI factor-conscious admissions actually advance rather than violate the 14th Amendment's core promise of equal protection by allowing universities to consider the full context of each applicant's life circumstances. Affirmative action is meant to help make society more equitable. This doesn’t mean equal outcomes or even equal opportunity. That’s impossible. But it does mean working toward making things *more* equitable. - **Conservative Counterpoint:** What about students entered in that aren’t ready? You’re doing them a disservice by allowing them to get in somewhere that they will feel overwhelmed by. - This is an inevitable side effect of not only affirmative action but also normal admissions. Sure, affirmative action might enter some students in who aren’t ready for the rigor of the institution they’re going to, but it also enters in many students who have great skills and knowledge that wouldn’t have been entered before because you didn’t take into account how much harder they had to work to get to “equal footing” with those who didn’t. Perhaps some students are entered in that aren’t as academically focused because of their culture. That’s okay. It’s good to have some perspectives of students who are more relationship or club focused. Would you really want the entire student base to be single mindidly be focused on grades. The challenge is in figuring out the line of where to admit applicants that are disadvantaged they are given better opportunity while not putting them somewhere they aren’t ready for. Even without affirmative action, there will always be applicants that look good on paper who don’t fit the school they go to. The line being hard to draw does not mean we shouldn’t attempt it in the first place.