Giving Minorities a Chance at Higher Education

Essay by bazookCollege, Undergraduate March 2004

download word file, 5 pages 3.5 1 reviews

This essay was written by Shirley Strum Kenny who is the president of the State University of New York. This essay opens a great controversy about letting diversity people get into the colleges as easy as possible or just keep doing the same thing that they have been doing for a while. The author opens her essay asking a question "Does diversity in higher education justify racial preferences?" and she answered, yes, we must open college education to students of all economic and racial background.

The author points out two important thoughts; one is that diversity is not an end in itself. It is a means toward a much bigger and longer-range goal- a more prosperous and harmonious society, and second that "racial preferences" it refers to admitting African- Americans and Latino students with out judging the SAT scores because this tests themselves are unbiased measures of who is most likely to succeed in college.

But this perception is false on two counts: 1) the tests are not bias free: and 2) they are not the best predictors of college success. This means that White students tend to do better than black students on the SATs. The assumption that some people make is that white students therefore have better qualifications for college as proven by an absolutely not prejudice measure of ability. SATs ignores that they are not the best predictors of college success in any case getting a higher SAT scores are recognized as good predictors of success in the first year of college work. The single best predictor of overall college success is class rank at whatever high school the student attends; being No. 1 slot indicates potential for success better than any other single factor. That's why Universities in California and Texas have made high schools class...