[ajscanlan]

Originally I was against the idea of affirmative action but I've came around to it, but I still don't understand the need to solve for racial distribution rather than socioeconomic distribution.

In my mind affirmative action's goal should be to break the cycle of poverty, where smart kids have poor/uneducated parents which holds them back and they grow up to be poor/uneducated themselves and so on.

It's my understanding that this problem disproportionately affects minorities (in particular black people), so solving for socioeconomic would "self select" (I don't know the proper term) for black people and avoid the issue of "Asian kid with poor/uneducated parents passed over for black kid with richer/educated parents" right?

Or is that just not a real issue? The article seems to mention pluses and minuses (e.g. "two college-educated parents (minus) from a major American city (minus) with aspirations to study either computer science (minus)") so it could be that the above hypothetical would never happen.

I don't know, I'm just struggling to understand why colleges would care more about solving racial distribution rather than socioeconomic distribution.

[frustrated_90]

I read a paper on this - if you cut the data by social-economic status, the number of 'qualified' black students would be just over 2%, and I think the colleges are targeting 8% of each incoming class (they don't call it a quota but it is, since it stays consistent each year regardless of overall applicants' demographic changes).

[whenanother]

why not both? income and race. suddenly poor white men will become a protected class. for the uninitiated, this should make you realized that affirmative action only helps the wealthy members of each demographic. we also should add a citizenship criteria.

i do think a better way of measuring wealth is needed. maybe the amount of money you are deducting from your taxes. nobody who knows finance, aka the wealthy, has a large amount of taxable income.