Hu's on First editorials
page
Basically my findings are that Affirmative Action generally means racial
preferences for under-represented groups, and sometimes means preferences that
aren't under-represented such as Asians in law school (Stanford, University of
Washington), or in the general university (University of Minnesota). At the most
selective schools such as MIT, Harvard or Stanford, the chance of admission was
typically 1.5 to 2 times greater with much lower academic scores and grades for
favored groups.
This is contrary to the once popular notion that affirmative action was never
about preferences but about treating students equally regardless of race. As
laws such as Prop 1209 and Initiative 200 directly banned preferences, the
defence has moved from denying the presence of prefernces to arguing that such
preferences are neccesary to maintain "diversity" in the spirit of the 1978
Bakke decision, however later decisions such as Hopwood have effectively struck
down even this "diversity" justification for discrimination.
In many schools, the goal which was sometimes achieved was based on
population (many elite law and medical schools were equal or over 11-12% balck
population in late 80s) or high school graduate (UCLA and Berekeley). University
of Washington had over 28% Asian law students in mid 90's despite state
population only 5%.
In some cases there was evidence for bias against groups relative to whites,
the so-called Asian quotas, such as UCLA and Berkeley in 1984, Brown in 1982,
Harvard in 1983 (which oddly enough seemed to also include the under-represented
but growing Hispanic population).
The
Color of Meritocracy \clipim\99\09\29\color.htm La Griffe du Lion explains
why colleges need preferences to increase numbers of minorities and why so many
Jews and Asians are found at Harvard based on cognitive IQ distribution. A bit
technical, but generally along the lines of what I've found based on SAT
distributions.
