Your Future Looms

Traditionally, the undergraduate experience seems to serve as a benchmark testing whether or not you're cut out for an advanced degree. You want to leave? Fine. You want to stay? Fine. Jump through these hoops. Perhaps there are different schools out there that prepare their students for different futures; for example, I just spoke with a recent Berkeley graduate who is now working for HP. He told me that his education left him somewhat underprepared for working. He went on to add that people who'd gone to a different, less prestigious school, actually had more practical skills than he did. Part of it, of course, is the curriculum you select, but a lot of it is what the professors want to emphasize. It's most important to determine what you would like to be doing in ten years or so and choose your school accordingly. Thanks to accreditation, all creditable schools will provide you with the skills necessary for a career in the field you choose. Of course, if you never get to school, that's a different matter entirely.

The University of California system is a public school system, comprising nine campuses and approximately two hundred thousand students. It is funded partly by tax dollars, which were frozen in the 1970's as a result of Proposition 13 (the no new property taxes proposition -- indecent, if I ever saw one). The University of California is run by a board of directors known as regents. The regents are not elected, except for the single student regent, selected out of those two hundred thousand students. The regents, whom you might call cronies, er, fiscal backers of the governor, serve twelve year terms. Are the regents in touch? Probably not. Do they control my mouth? No. Will they sue me? The answer is a definite maybe. I got a letter once from the regents' lawyer. If they pay him well enough to go through my file with a fine-toothed comb, I'd rather not mess with them.

I'm not going to go into hideous detail regarding the regents and the various ways that they're undermining the school. One of these, however, seems to be the dismantling of affirmative action (even before Prop 209 went into effect a few days ago).

Pat Buchanan ran a column wherein he cheered the decline in minority applicants to UC professional (law, medical) and undergraduate schools. He held it up as a sure sign that "underrepresented" minorities simply weren't qualified to enter these schools. He then went on to make his "modest" proposal: that those who truly believed in preferential admissions should give up their spots to the "unqualified" (his word, not mine). On the surface, his arguments make sense.

Of course, there are more factors than simple test scores at work here.

"Minority students are poorly equipped for the realities of Pretentious Pompous Jr. University study. Therefore, admitting them is a horrible waste of time and resources."
One of the underlying reasons for being "poorly equipped" (with respect to study skills, family support, etc.) is because a lot of minority students haven't had the same kind of opportunities as most students get. You tell me, who's more likely to go to college, the child of migrant workers or the child of university professors? Right, not all disparities are so obvious, but if you're never going to give everyone a chance to change, pretty soon the country is going to be filled with haves and have-nots. It's not the job of the haves to keep the have-nots from joining their ranks.

Maybe that's what everyone is so afraid of, that one day the child you see on the streets could grow up and work side by side with your own children. I ask: why not? After all, we should not be obsessing on the latest way to claw our way ahead of everyone else; we should try to step forward together, we should lend a hand to make sure that everyone is keeping up. Those who oppose affirmative action seem to have lost sight of the original goal: not to keep people out and favor others, but to plan for the future, when every resource, especially the humans, will be precious. Of course it requires sacrifices, but most people are willing to bear them; there are plenty of people who work long hours to send their children to college, in hopes for a better future. Perhaps we should recouch the issue of affirmative action as a sacrifice today for a better tomorrow, where people focus less on surface issues as race and nationality and instead hope for all humans.

"I've noticed that minority students at PPJU seem to lose self-esteem because they think they got in because the PPJU brass had to fill a quota to keep the Government happy."
I'm not even going to go through a "lesser of two evils" arguement here (i.e. whether it would be more damaging to be admitted based on quota or to never receive that opportunity in the first place) because I'm reasonably sure that quotas do not exist. Yes, there are outreach programs (Berkeley PLEDGE) and extended admissions factors, but those have been ruled strictly constitutional (Bakke v. Board of Regents). The arguement that one loses self-esteem when admitted "unfairly" really loses its validity when you query those who were admitted -- most of these people are extremely bright and motivated students eager to make the most out of the opportunity that has been presented to them. Unfairness and self-esteem are all in the eye of the beholder and not actually asking those most affected is misleading.

"Well, frankly, the PPJU campus is filled with little separatist living groups, where members of one race will swarm together and exclude all others."
Diversity provides an education by itself. Learning about different cultures and expanding your horizions is an important part of any college experience (especially if you come from a community of limited diversity like myself). Often I find that hostile attitudes (such as those outlined above) will force students of the same race to band together mainly for reassurance. While many of these groups would welcome the chance for dialogue with other races, they often find an unreceptive audience, which in turn discourages them from trying to reach out. What is needed is a shifting of attitudes from "us versus them" to "all of us versus the future."

"As far as I can tell, PPJU minority students choose easier majors, presumably because they can't handle the real majors."
Who's to decide what is and what is not a hard major? "Hard" is in the eye of the beholder; I have some skill at mechanical engineering and I don't happen to think that it was super-difficult, but if you asked me to diagram a sentence and tell me what the predicate is, I'd be hopelessly lost. Ask me about the nuclear fuel cycle, not how the socioeconomic mores of the 19th century affected the style and tone of Melville's Moby Dick. People choose their career based on their talent, not because someone tells them that's all they can do.

Of course, we're again getting into the issue of unpreparedness based on one's race. It's more a question of opportunities, and whether or not we're willing to provide everyone with the opportunities to change their lives.

"OK, so why don't we do exactly as Mr. Buchanan says and ask those people of "overrepresented" races to give up their spots to these underqualified folks?"

How about this instead: why don't we start shaking up the system and give precendence to factors beyond straight test-scores? We could take into account the parents' background, the community, the opportunities available ... well, actually, that's what the system is doing right now, and some call that unfair. I choose to call it reality; if you've ever been late to an appointment because of traffic or similar reasons, there's no need to say that you should never get another appointment again. Sometimes, circumstances are beyond our control and we can only hope that someone recognizes that and does their level best to correct the things leading to that, whether it involves giving you a second chance or creating new opportunities based on potential, rather than history.

Frankly, I see the key as being that UC is a public system, so it should reflect the public population of California. Perhaps someday it will, but right now, it seems to be slipping backwards.

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