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Grex Poetry Item 173: Who is served by racial quotas in college admissions? [frozen]
Entered by russ on Thu Feb 10 04:34:00 UTC 2000:

Something Jan Wolter wrote once made me think to bring this up here.

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/williams.html

Walter Williams 

Black students as
meal tickets 

http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- 
THERE'S A STORY about a visitor to an Indian reservation who sees a
Bureau of Indian Affairs officer uncontrollably crying. He asks, "Why
are you crying?"  The officer sobs, "My Indian died."  The officer
didn't give a hoot about the Indian, he was worried about his budget
that was determined by the number of "his" Indians.  How much truth is
in that story is one thing, but it surely has application to the
plight of many black college students. 

Here's a question: What serves the interests of black college students
the most, a college admitting as many as possible or a college having
as many as possible graduate?  The answer depends on where you sit, and
I'll say why after a few statistics.

Nationally, only 26 percent of black students graduate six years after
entering college. That's about half the graduation rate of white students.
At some colleges, no more than 20 percent of black students admitted
graduate. Many who do graduate do so with grade point averages that are
lower than their white or Asian counterparts. These statistics on academic
failure are not new. They've existed since colleges began racial
double-standards in admission.

Black students who fail to graduate are not beneficiaries of this nearly
three-decades old failure story, but there are beneficiaries. College
presidents benefit from a policy of admitting black students with little
or no hope of graduation. 
....
Students are not qualified or unqualified in any absolute sense. The
nation's more than 3,000 colleges means there's a college for most anybody.
A large part of the failure to graduate problem is academic mismatch: the
wrong student being in the wrong college.

[Rest of the column is at the URL.]

2 responses total.

#1 of 2 by orinoco on Thu Feb 10 15:16:46 2000:

Were you looking for Agora, perhaps?

Or would poetic responses
to the college admissions process
be in order?

#2 of 2 by russ on Sat Feb 12 03:04:22 2000:

Yup, wrong conf.  Sorry, my bad.

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