Dear MEL Topic Readers,
Top US college's diversity slumps after affirmative action ban
In a higher education context in the US, affirmative action is the
practice of considering some student background characteristics such as race as
a factor in deciding whether to admit an applicant. Colleges that engage in
affirmative action have extremely low acceptance rates, such as Harvard and MIT.
The use of racial quotas, in which colleges reserve a designated number of
spots for students based on their race and admit them exclusively on that basis
to maintain students’ racial, ethnic, and economic diversity had been widely
debated in higher education for decades until when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled
against the deliberate use of race by schools in college admissions in June last
year. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) announced that the percentage
of black, Hispanic, Native American and/or Pacific islanders among the newly
enrolled students dropped by 10 percentage points from the previous year to 16%
while the percentage of Asian American students jumped from 40% to 47%.
Cultural emphasis on education, family expectations and support, and
socioeconomic factors are some of the factors why the presence of Asian
Americans is so high in America’s higher education. The proportion of white
students was nearly unchanged at 38%. What about other prominent universities
and colleges?
Read the article and learn about the impact of the abolition of
affirmative action in higher education.
