BY: CLAIRE KIM
Recently, the Trump administration has announced its affirmative action against Obama’s plan for racial selectiveness in school admissions. For the past two terms that Obama has served as president of the United States, he has always emphasized this idea of diversity in a lot of his campaigns and projects. When it came to the topic of school admissions, he showed his passion for racial diversity by encouraging schools to partake in a selection process that would consider race as a factor on top of a student’s academic abilities. The main reason he wanted to implement this new admission process was so that universities could diversify their campuses and promote a more racially accepting atmosphere for students and adults to experience. However, although this process was meant to be fair for all students, based on what happened with the case of Harvard against Asian-American discrimination, even Trump began to question whether this really was the way schools should be deciding on which students they accept. With that in mind, the administration has been creating a new policy that will demand schools to be racially-blind when accepting students or else chances of lawsuits or investigations against schools could be charged. In my opinion, the intention Obama was going for by advocating diversity was a courageous step, however, I do believe that schools should not consider race as a huge factor in a student’s college application because it is discriminating against a certain population as well. Although this process may be benefitting those who are in minority racial groups, it greatly affects racial groups such as Asian-Americans much more negatively. Aside from this whole racial matter, I believe that schools should be selecting their students based on their academic capability and other talents that show their efforts they have built up over their years in school. These standards will accurately determine whether or not they will perform to the best of their ability when they do choose them but also prove that they are hardworking and deserve a chance to claim a spot in top universities. I don’t think it’s fair to tell a group of students that they have fewer chances of getting into a college just because their skin color doesn’t cooperate with the racial ratio that colleges are aiming to reach to achieve campus diversity. However, although I do find a student’s capability to be very important, I also find that diversity does improve the overall learning environment tremendously. Because of this, I would be fine with continuing the current system, but while making sure to look at skills and ability as the main deciding factor for college acceptances in the end.
claire kim. 