PROFESSOR: Affirmative Action Isn't Helping The Right People

[FarCenter]

Indiana University Maurer School of Law professor Kevin Brown supports considering race as a factor in admissions but says there is a problem in how affirmative action is implemented.

Colleges are giving fewer and fewer spots to "the traditional African-American" students with two black parents, whose ancestors endured discrimination, while giving more spots to black immigrants, Brown told Business Insider.

Black immigrants, who started coming to the U.S. in larger numbers after the 1970s, tend to have higher incomes that non-immigrant blacks, which leads to stronger college applications. Now there's a disproportionately high number of black immigrants at elite colleges. One study found 40% of the black freshman at Ivy League institutions were immigrants even though that population only accounted for 18% of black 18- and 19-year-olds in the U.S.

Brown says colleges should make a special effort to include "traditional African Americans" as well as immigrants.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/kevin-brown-on-affirmative-action-2013-5

[badtoworse]

1. Maybe race should be removed as a consideration altogether

If you have to differentiate between member of the same race based on a non-racial criterion, the issue ceases to be racial. If you create a set aside for low income blacks, why not low income something else?

[cprise]

3. You can't remove it as a criterion

as long as there is significant tendency toward discrimination against certain groups. Racist preferences and resegregation would swamp the system esp. in the current climate.

FWIW, what the article describes may have little to do with race and is more related to perverse incentives that cause even state colleges to prefer foreign students.

[cprise]

2. Isn't this tied to the incentivizing of foreign enrollment?

Where even state colleges are preferentially recruiting foreign students because the system of incentives make those students' enrollments more lucrative than having American students.

[FarCenter]

4. These aren't foreign students --they are immigrants or children of immigrants

The article goes on to say:

Other black scholars have also brought up the touchy issue of who's benefitting from affirmative action. At a reunion of Harvard's black alumni in 2004, the noted Harvard professors Lani Guinier and Henry Louis Gates Jr. pointed out that roughly two-thirds of Harvard's black undergrads at the time were immigrants or their children, or children of interracial couples.

There was also an article in the Wilson Quarterly some years back that said that the West Indian immigrant population had a higher socioeconomic standing that the average white ethnic group.

[byeya]

5. I think afirmative action should be based on class and need. Poor people from Appalachia, an

area where education is not a priority, deserve government help more than children of well off lawyers(say).

[geek tragedy]

6. At that point, 'black' isn't a race it's an ethnicity. nt