"...Just from the reading of her credentials*, I didn't necessarily think that she would have gotten into Harvard with those alone. YES, she certainly out-performed me when I was in high school in every way, and I am in complete awe of her accomplishments. However, those sort of students are a dime a dozen come application time. I heard that there are actually more Merit Scholars applying for Harvard than actual seats..."

This reminds me of something Malcolm Gladwell said in Outliers : The Story of Success:

"...The psychologist Barry Schwartz recently proposed that elite schools give up their complex admissions process and simply hold a lottery for everyone above the threshold. 'Put people into two categories,' Schwartz says. 'Good enough and not good enough. The ones who are good enough get put into a hat. And those who are not good enough get rejected.' Schwartz concedes that his idea has virtually no chance of being accepted. But he's absolutely right...

"...Let me give you an example of the threshold effect in action. The University of Michigan law school, like many elite US educational institutions, uses a policy of affirmative action when it comes to applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds. Around 10 percent of the students Michigan enrolls each fall are members of racial minorities, and if the law school did not significantly relax its entry requirements for those students—admitting them with lower undergraduate grades and lower standardized-test scores than everyone else—it estimates that percentage would be less than 3 percent. Furthermore, if we compare the grades that the minority and nonminority students get in law school, we see that the white students do better. That's not surprising: if one group has higher undergraduate grades and test scores than the other, it's almost certainly going to have higher grades in law school as well...

"...A few years ago, however, the University of Michigan decided to look closely at how the law school's minority students had fared after they graduated. How much money did they make? How far up in the profession did they go? How satisfied were they with their careers? What kind of social and community contributions did they make? What kind of honors had they won? They looked at everything that could conceivably be an indication of real-world success. And what they found surprised them.

"...'We knew that our minority students, a lot of them, were doing well," says Richard Lempert, one of the authors of the Michigan study. 'I think our expectation was that we would find a half- or two-thirds-full glass, that they had not done as well as the white students but nonetheless a lot were quite successful. But we were completely surprised. We found that they were doing every bit as well. There was no place we saw any serious discrepancy.'

"What Lempert is saying is that by the only measure that a law school really ought to care about—how well its graduates do in the real world—minority students aren't less qualified. They're just as successful as white students. And why? Because even though the academic credentials of minority students at Michigan aren't as good as those of white students, the quality of students at the law school is high enough that they're still above the threshold. They are smart enough..."

Well the problem with your assessment is that while "economic status" may have played a role in impressing the admissions committee (wow, she's done all this despite her challenges!) the only the thing the college can *officially* count in their affirmative action statistics is race. If there *were* something lacking from her application, race could justify her acceptance, while economic status alone would not usually be enough. Also, gender usually doesn't have much to do with acceptance, especially at a school like Harvard. Colleges usually just try to keep the mix as close to 50/50 as they can, and qualified female applicants are so common, that's it's necessary to purposely seek them out for acceptance.

I am against affirmative action *the way it is currently thought of.* I do not believe that race *necessarily* makes anyone more or less advantaged when it comes to the college admission process. I believe that a program like affirmative action that is based on economic statistics rather than race would have a much more positive effect in terms of both diversity and helping those who are truly disadvantaged. As it stands now, it's making the assumption that *all* "people of color" are economically disadvantaged and doesn't help any white students who truly are. For example, I went to a small prestigious college that actively sought out "students of color" with a special recruiting weekend every year for high school kids. One year my friend hosted one of the students and spent some time hanging out with her. Her mom was white and her dad was african american, and she had driven to campus in her BMW from her boarding school in Connecticut. She took all AP courses and her school had a 100% college matriculation rate.

Of course other students attending the event truly did need the extra recruiting attention, but the fact that the college could count this student in its "affirmative action" roles, and went out of their way to provide an expense-free introduction to the college simply because she could check one race box over another did not sit well with me. I went to a very underfunded and very racially diverse high school. I knew that NO ONE at my high school- whether they were white or black or anything in between- was getting the correct information about colleges: the guidance counselors were more involved with dealing with pregnant teens and basically advised students to apply to Harvard and the local community college. The only way to get past that was for you and your family to seek out more information, which yes, often fell on the more economically stable families. What many students at my high school needed was a free trip to see a good college like the one offered at my college. The problem is though, that the way affirmative action works- that race stats are the only motivation for the colleges to do this- is that equally disadvantaged white students from the same high schools would not be invited, and no extra effort would be made to expose them to the school. And yes, if left up to family income and/or education, I'm sure a lot of the students taking advantage of these programs would still be "students of color," it would more accurately level the playing field for *all* students. I don't think a middle-class Africa-American student with actively involved, educated parents at a decent high school should be more heavily recruited than a low-income white student with absent parents, etc. This situation may be rarer in this country than the opposite- which is unfortunate- but if you changed the criteria, this situation would be avoided, and no one would be made worse off.

Also, I've heard arguments that affirmative action is a sort of attempt to compensate for slavery and oppression- I could be wrong but I *believe* this is how it started. This could be justifying argument if affirmative action were limited to African-American students. But it usually isn't- it's usually based on being "of color" with certain races more in demand. Many immigrant groups have suffered oppression in this country, regardless of race. Whether it is currently a problem is simply a matter of time. I don't think any colleges currently need programs to recruit and admit say, Irish or Japanese students, who logically could argue for compensation for past cultural oppression more than some other groups that are included. When it comes down to it, it's all about appearances, race, as the student self-identifies it. And yes, the only thing that matters for affirmative action is how the student checks the box- I could check something other than what I outwardly appear to be and be admitted on those grounds and then be totally different. I'm sure the college could investigate, but I doubt many would. That just illustrates how arbitrary the current affirmative action system really is.

So in the end, I really do think we need affirmative action in college admittance (in terms of jobs and stuff, I don't think as much). But I think the whole country needs to re-think what "affirmative action" means and what the goals really are.