That’s why the UCs banned AA, to create a two-tier state university system. Berkeley and UCLA are for White students and Asian, or Asian-American students(who they haven’t gotten around to restricting yet, but don’t worry, they’re probably working on it) only.

Here is the first one, with the article, and here is the second one, with the short bios.

Sorry ’bout that!

Imposing uniform standards against a non-uniform population lowers quality.

That’s right, lowers quality.
Recently, the University of California (UC) Board of Regents issued a report showing that the prestigious UC Berkeley admitted 378 students who scored less than 1,000 points on the SAT, rejecting more than 600 others with SAT scores surpassing 1,500.

After this disclosure generated considerable controversy, UC Berkeley then released 41 brief biographies of some of the students with low SAT scores, which are reproduced here for your reference.

Now, I suggest following that link and reading those brief biographies. Then, come back and try to explain to me why those students should have been denied admission to UC Berkeley because their SAT scores weren’t high enough. Explain to me how their lives, and the obstacles they have overcome, prove that they don’t have what it takes to do college work.

The admissions offices themselves have pretty clear policies for particular tiers of students. They don’t have time to deal with the volume of applications by saying “Oh, what the heck, let’s give this guy a .5 boost.” U of Michigan uses (or at least until recently used) a ‘point system,’ not a straight GPA.

Elena wasn’t able to provide any evidence at all that minorities got an entire .5 bonus to their GPA simply by virtue of being minorities, other than student rumors.

And funnily, nobody “invalidates the achievements” of students who got in because Daddy and Grandpa went to their school before them. Assuming that minority students are lame-os who only got in through AA is a cover-up for racism and offended white privilege. Nobody bitches that a white student only got in because his daddy went to the same college.

A study on affirmative action at California schools finds ethnicity is not much of a help.

Let’s just say that on threads I start (Pseudo-Adrienne makes her own policy for her own threads, of course), I’d prefer that other posters not be told that their position reveals the “stupidity and paranoia” of their camp. I’d rather people try to act as if the feelings of the other people posting here mattered to them.

For example, a white student with a 3.5 undergrad GPA might have a 70% chance of being admitted to the law school, and a black student of similar background and accomplishments might need to have a 3.2 GPA to have the same 70% chance of admission. In such a case, it would have been common to talk about the “0.3 GPA points that they give to black students”, as a useful shorthand for the actual tinkering that was taking place. I remember, dimly, having such conversations at the time - but it was 15 years ago.

And with that in mind, Sally, you might want to exercise prudence in throwing around the “stupid” and “paranoid” slams. Elena is trying in good faith to recall details of intellectual arguments from a decade and a half ago, and her memory of the facts, while not verified as exactly correct, does jibe fairly well with a reasonable interpretation of the facts that we know to be true.

In other words, when you can’t provide evidence, you shift the terms of the debate to “this was true” to “let’s talk about people’s perceptions even if they were inaccurate.”

MSU currently has an anti-legacy stance. I can’t say if that was true in 1991. It certainly wasn’t true of MSU rival U of M.

So it was debated, whether or not the facts of the debate were correct, who knows? If it was incorrect, it was people’s perception of AA back then, right or wrong. But I can say that I doubt that this is something kept on an open record for the public, especially if it was discontinued. 1991 was pre-internet, barely.

MSU now has a very cool program, acronym CAMP or CAMPO (?) that helps children of migrant workers prepare for regular college work through ESL classes, writing classes and heavy academic counseling
all while living on campus. I’m guessing there are grants and loans involved for the kids too.

If this weren’t true, the whole affirmative action issue would not have been raised. Or only partly raised, because FTMP, there’s hush-hush silence on “good old white boy” networks, legacies and cronyism, otherwise known as white men’s affirmative action. Certainly not from Mr. Bolton here.

The whole issue on Affirmative Action is stupid, because it’s on its way to elimination. FTMP, it has benefitted mostly white women, then enough of them got on the “it’s racist” bandwagon with white men to vote it out of several states including California. Not to mention all the practices beginning in elementary schools which are so damaging to the development of Hispanic and Black students.

Affirmative Action programs aren’t and haven’t been nearly as beneficial to men and women of color. They probably never will have an opportunity to do what they were intended to do, which is even the playing field, or as MLK, jr. (who despite conservatives’ misuse of the only line from the only speech of his they know, supported AA programs) put the starting blocks of all people on the same starting line.

At my university, minority students in the College of Civil Engineering received automatic .5 grade point boosts.

Assumedly, the missing context lost in the haze of memory is that incoming minority students had an average GPA of 0.5 less than incoming white students. The “automatic grade boost” would be performed by the admissions committee, not to the school’s professors.

These are Fox News-watching, Ted Kennedy-hating conservative men, too. Fun times ;-)

Am I the only one who sometimes feels pressure not to screw up, because if I do, its an indication of my WHOLE FREAKING SUBCULTURE (women, and low income in this case)?

Do you think it’s possible that either your memory was wrong, or that the student newspaper was mistaken or misreported somehow? I find it hard to believe that such a policy would exist but not be written about frequently and well-documented by AA opponents.

Michigan State, circa 1991.

Legacies, for example. Legacies are the lowest and most useless variety of affirmative action.