S. Sugimoto

Section A01

Week 3

Racially Based Admission Quotas

            Nakanishi’s “Quota on Excellence?” discusses a major controversy between the Asian American Community and many of the nation’s top universities.  As an Asian American who attended highly competitive high school in Cupertino in which the majority of the city’s and school’s population is Asian (Chinese and Indian), the idea of racial quotas at the best ranked universities was not a comforting thought.  A person’s grades certainly should not be the only point of consideration in student admissions, but race absolutely must not be a deciding factor in an applicant’s admission decision as it has no direct correlation to a person’s intelligence.  An academic institution should be a place where intelligence and knowledge are be held in the highest regard.  Trying to force racial diversity in an academic environment will only foster a discrepancy between those who were admitted because they were a part of a racial group considered disadvantaged, and those who are there because they were rejected due to being a part of a racial group considered advantaged.  For example let us say there are two students with similar socio-economic background are applying as Electrical Engineers to the UC system, one East Asian with a high school GPA of 3.7 and one Latino with a high school GPA of 3.0.  Because race was considered as a part of the admissions process these two students now both go to the highest ranked UC that admitted them, UC Davis.  Given that they have similar socio-economic backgrounds, the Latino student is now constantly pitted against his smarter Asian colleague and therein lies the discrepancy in levels of intelligence.  Should race have not been considered, the East Asian student would have gone to a better ranked school like UCLA, so that now both students would be competing students of equal intelligence.

Question: Instead of race, would a person’s socio-economic background be a better factor in a determining a student’s admission decision?

A statistic brought up in "Quota on Excellence?"