Voronwë the Faithful wrote:You say that discriminates against the highest achievers. But that system does not do so. It assures that everyone in the top ten percent (a pretty broad definition of "the highest achievers") are automatically accepted.
I am surprised to see you make this argument; I find it extremely unpersuasive. I think it is fairly uncontroversial that schools are not created equally in terms of the difficulty of finishing in their top 10 percent. This is true for several reasons. Some schools attract more capable student bodies, meaning that the competition to secure a high class rank is much more intense. Some schools teach courses at a higher level than others, or offer more advanced courses altogether - both of which factors make it difficult for students to score as highly. Finishing in the top 30 percent at school A may require one to score highly in many advanced placement courses and develop fluency in a second language, while one need only complete first-level courses in chemistry and English to finish in the top 10 percent at school B.
I saw this very clearly as an undergraduate, when I attended two different schools. My first school was a former community college that had recently become a four-year institution; it had very low admissions standards. This affected everything about the educational curriculum - courses were taught at a lower level, the tests given were easier, the grading was less intense. Maintaining a 4.0 was effortless. When I transferred to William & Mary, everything intensified - courses were taught at a harder level, the competition between students for top grades was more intense, the grading was more demanding, and maintaining a 4.0 was a difficult, rare task (many of us who were very hardworking couldn't quite make it, including me). In turn, as a top-ranked chemistry major at W&M who had taken four semesters of organic chemistry, I was chagrined when I visited Harvard my senior year as part of a choir tour and stayed with sophomore chemistry students - and realized that their first-semester organic class had material of such advanced difficulty that we hadn't covered it in
four semesters' worth of organic material at W&M, some of which W&M viewed as graduate coursework.
Based on my experiences, to insist that admitting the top 10 percent of each class across the state is admitting "the highest achievers" is simply inaccurate. It is, instead, a very thinly disguised manner of admitting people who would not otherwise be able to compete for admission because they are not, in fact, the highest achievers. It requires rejecting people who are, say, in the top 15-20 percent of high schools where they have taken harder classes and more intense tests to secure their class rank than some of the people who are admitted. This is not a merit-based system, and I do not support it.
To the extent that the above paragraph highlights that students are not offered the same opportunities to take advanced classes in high school, or are not given the opportunity to work hard and take advanced preparatory courses in elementary and middle school that will prepare them for a full complement of AP/IB courses in high school, then it is
this disparity that society needs to address in lieu of affirmative action - which is a different way of stating what vison says in her first sentence.
Nor does it apply any kind of rigid, race (or gender) based quota to be applied. It simply allows that factor to be considered as part of the person's background and experience.
Considering race as a factor in admissions "simply" allows for rejection of people who would otherwise not have been rejected, on the grounds that they have the wrong skin color -
regardless of how diverse their experiences have been (see, e.g., the Indian immigrant whose story I described yesterday). By making a couple of racial and ethnic backgrounds a proxy for "different backgrounds and experiences," we indeed lose something critical to an educational system: the opportunity to consider each person's backgrounds, disadvantages, and experiences, in the manner that I advocated yesterday that law schools seem to have started to use via "diversity statements."