Pro’s of Affirmative Action Con’s of Affirmative Action
  • Creates diversity in college campuses and some businesses.
  • Provides students starting at a disadvantage a boost.
  • Draws people to areas of study and work they may never consider.
  • Some stereotypes are broken with affirmative action
  • Creates equal opportunity for minorities and women in college admissions
  • Make up for past discrimination and prevent current discrimination
  • Acts as a desegregation program for upper eductaion
  • Leads to reverse discrimination.
  • Lowers standards of accountability needed to push students or employees to perform better.
  • Some students admitted on affirmative action are often ill-equipped to handle the school.
  • Student chosen based on race and ethnic rather than how qualified they are.
  • Help lead to a truly color-blind society.
  • It is condescending to minorities to say they need affirmative action to succeed.
  • Unfair, passes over better qualified individuals which leads to reverse discrimination.
  • Race consciousness increases rather than promotinga color-blind justice.

What does this mean? Does affirmative action hurt minorities more in the long run rather than helping them? That’s what affirmative action was set up for; to give a boost to encouraging minorities towards higher academic standard schools.

In the short term, effects of affirmative action is a great help to minorities. It squishes racism in college admissions and helps to create diversity on a college campus. Affirmative action gives opportunities to the minorities that were not available to them earlier in history.

For the long term, effects show the Achilles’ heel of affirmative action. If colleges lower their academic standards to be able to accept more students of minorities, then those students may be ill-equipped to handle the pace or standards of that college. Colleges will lower their academic standards, but not their graduation requirements. So in the end, the students admitted who were possibly unprepared are the ones who drop out or be in the lower part of their class.