Affirmative Action

4 Pages 1080 Words

There are many issues in today’s society that have two solid sides to them, sides, or positions, that cannot be proven absolutely wrong or right. Issues such as capital punishment, abortion, labor unions, animal rights and the list goes on and on. But one issue of this sort haunts our schools, our industries, and the subject, or core, of the issue has haunted our country for the last century. The subject of race, and the issue of affirmative action. In the case of affirmative action, like other controversial issues, each side is strongly supported and neither side can be proven right or proven wrong. The supporters claim it is the best way to ensure equal opportunity in the schools and in the workplace, while those opposing it claim that it merely takes away opportunity from one race, and unjustly hands it to another. The side of this fine line that will be exploited in the following paragraphs is the side opposing affirmative action. The results of affirmative action are more harmful than helpful because it negatively affects the general public, denies opportunity to the deserving, and is an abuse of law and power by government. First, affirmative action negatively affects the public by setting quotas and standards in fields of life that race should have no preference to. For example: colleges and universities.
Standards should not be set on which percentage of which race should attend a college or university. An Ivy League school shouldn’t be required to have a percentage of students of each race and nationality. They should be allowed to enroll whom they feel best suits the educational requirements needed to be successful at the school. When standards are in effect students, who were accepted as a result of affirmative action, may find they cannot meet the educational requirements at the school and fail out. This in turn will more than likely either waste a years worth of work, and the individual will just attend another univer...