September 21, 2016

Dear Presidential Candidates,

About a year ago, I learned that colleges are required to accept minorities with lower SAT scores than caucasians, called the affirmative action. Learning this gave me a strong opinion about this topic. From an early age, I’ve always hoped to go to University of Wisconsin-Madison or an Ivy League school. Realizing my chances are lowered because of being accepted upsets me.

If all races have or should have equal rights, why do minorities with lower SAT scores get accepted over whites with higher scores? Although some minorities cannot afford superior SAT preparation, some whites can’t either. There is also minorities who can afford good SAT preparation. A white can work all their life to get into their dream school, spend their extra money on SAT prep, and the minority student gets into their dream school but the white does not, even though the white got 200 points more. In 1997, California struggled with the affirmative action in their colleges. They had low grades and lots of failures, a selective institution had only one African-American student with a GPA higher than 3.5.

Even though skin color should not be a concern when it comes to something as serious as education and career, this problem is not only impacting whites for the worse. The people the affirmative action is intended to help, are getting a negative impact out of it. There are studies proven to show that minorities tend to show more interest in STEM and science majors than their fellow white students and colleague. Due to policies of the affirmative action, minorities are prevented from majoring in those subjects. The following quote is presented by UCLA professor, Roger Bolus, “[S]tudents with credentials more than one standard deviation below their science peers at college are about half as likely to end up with science bachelor degrees, compared with similar students attending schools where their credentials are much closer to, or above, the mean credentials of their peers.” which explains how this prevents minorities also from doing what they wish to.

In conclusion, important things such as education and career should not be based at all about skin color or hereditary. Things such as this should be strictly based on how you show in your testing and grades. The affirmative action has a huge impact on everybody’s lives, and not in a good way, so if you’re going to be the president of The United States, what are you going to do about this issue.

Thanks for listening to my opinion,

Allison Crofoot