[stirbot]

These are clearly driven individuals who will excel anywhere. In fact when you consider grade inflation, they'd be better of going taking a scholarship from a flagship state university. Especially for STEM majors.

Affirmative action is an attempt to break the cycle of educational under-performance for certain groups in America. It's a blunt tool that needs to be improved, not discarded.

[Kaiyou]

The problem I see is that higher education never really improved performance of anyone. The way it historically worked was that higher education institutions would admit only the smartest people around and so only the smartest people would come out of them, too. Smartest roughly equates to highest performing.

Employers would then be able to use the certificate from those institutions to filter for only the smartest people since those were already filtered for to begin with to be eligible to get such a certificate.

If you put people into higher education that ain't already the smartest, you will get people coming out of higher education that ain't the smartest and employers will learn the hard way that the certificate in question is worthless and will begin to filter through other means. Now those students sit on debt they have no way to pay off, since high paying employers will find the smartest people around some other way.

[jbob2000]

This assumes that educational under-performance can be fixed by more education.

By my own experiences, the people who I have seen do well academically tended to have stable support systems (whether that is direct family or a mentor, or a solid group of friends, it doesn't matter). And likewise, the people who I have seen do poorly have broken or missing support systems (divorced or absent parents, bad friends or community).

Affirmative action does not solve the support system problem. All it does is throw people who can't swim into the deep end. I am not sure why people are confused as to why these people then drown.

[RandomInteger4]

Either that or given the current state of higher education, it's used as a way to take advantage of those desperate to better their lives under the false pretense that any degree they receive will land them a job that will afford them to pay back student loan debt.