Just by looking at my name, you can already see why I think this “strive” to correct governmental and social injustices against demographic groups and to sufficiently counteract past and present discrimination is totally bogus. I have been a victim of affirmative action for many years. I am an Asian-American from New Jersey, a U.S. state that has very impressive statistics on public education. That may seem like a good thing, but unfortunately there are at least 40,000 other people that are just like me. College admissions officers think all New Jersey Asians look the same, too. An Asian from North Dakota, for example, looks very different to an admissions officer. He or she has a better chance of getting into a big name school than me.
Here is my evidence. I got rejected (or wait-listed, then rejected) from eight of the thirteen schools that I applied to: two out of three of my “pride” schools, five out of seven of my “reach” schools, and one out of three of my “safety” schools. My standardized test scores and grade point average were quite commendable by even the highest standards of Asian parents. As a matter of fact, I got wait-listed at this school before coming here. If all that doesn’t say, “You suck at life,” I don’t know what does.
There is a clear problem in this country. High school education is definitely not uniform. The gap between the most prepared student and the least prepared is larger than the depths of the Pacific Ocean. The solution is to either bring the ones that are lagging up or bring the ones that are overachieving down. In this day in age, it seems like the first is more sensible through the eyes of a politician, only because it is what the budget ordered.
Affirmative action unfortunately is the idiotic solution that the government created just to please minorities. We are bringing about more stereotyping to counter and supplement the old stereotyping. Evidently, there is also tension between those groups that are more privileged than others. Take medical schools as an example. The Asians are not a minority in this case. In fact, the percentage of Asians living in America is greatly exceeded by the percentage of Asians applying to medical school, whereas other minorities are significantly underrepresented. How do you apply affirmative action in a pool of students where the minorities have turned into a majority?
To me, this is also an insult to the minorities, as if to say that we need the government’s help to get a job or get into a school. This generation of minorities has been much better able to adapt to American society than in years past, even those with language barriers. Especially now that I see people who can check ten boxes on the ethnicities section of forms, the affirmative action policy should start to become obsolete.
