The Most Qualified Students

“Why is it ok for a scholarship to bypass the most qualified student and go to one with lower scores and a Native American grandparent?” – Kelly Trainer

For years, even centuries, institutions of higher learning offered a variety of educational opportunities to the community they serve. Educational opportunities were not always limited to only the smartest and brightest students available. It is rather insulting how so many people want to exclude everything else at the expense of only getting the “most qualified”, meaning the student with the highest academic test scores.

One of the most prime examples of institutions of learning developing a separate set of enrollment standards for a separate set of students is the college athletic program. It has become a fact of life that a number of colleges and universities that participate in various sport competitions will offer scholarships to students with less than stellar test scores in order to assure they have the best chance to win the football title or the basketball title or whatever. Nobody has a problem with the fact that there are athletes on campus whose main contribution is their ability to shoot hoops or run through other players. The idea that the school has a separate scholarship program with a totally different set of standards for the athlete has never bothered anyone before. In fact, everybody supports the school when it bends the rules a bit in order to keep the jock as part of the student body. Everybody wants a winning collegiate team.

Different standards for different students are not new and never tried before concepts. But now that we have institutions who want to be proactive in their pursuit of a truly racial and cultural diverse student body, the idea that people getting special consideration for the schools needs is unacceptable. Too many people from the racially generic dominant class, that just so happen to be overwhelmingly white, do not acknowledge the value of racial diversity in a school setting or any other setting for that matter. The widely promoted idea is that a school would have a certain percentage of their opportunities reserved for minorities is nothing less than reverse discrimination or discrimination against white people. It is not hard to imagine that this protest would come from people who would never bother to acknowledge racial discrimination against black people.

When the vast majority of America’s institutions were regularly practicing racial discrimination to the benefit of the white population, black people and other minorities had to fight tooth and nail to stop it. Many black people paid with their lives in order to end the racial discrimination that has become the very foundation of the relationship between people of different skin color. And since white people have always benefited from racial disparity, it goes without saying that the vast majority of white people have the advantage when the only measure of qualification is a test score.

Nobody ever says that the tradition of giving preferences to the children of alumni or the children of faculty is unfair. Nobody ever says that giving preferences to athletes is unfair. Nobody says giving preferences to rich people who simply write a check to get their children educated is unfair. It is only unfair when preferences are made for racial diversity. If a school says that it would like to assure that at least five percent of its opportunities go to racial minorities, people in the dominant community will raise holy hell and say that minorities are getting preferential treatment despite the fact that white people would still have access to the remaining ninety five percent of the opportunities.

People in the racially generic dominant class will say that if black people want to go to school they should earn their way. The fact that America has neglected the black community through various manipulations from institutionalized slavery to laws of separation and woefully unequal to disparity through the uneven distribution of educational funding to an over emphasis on the hazards of reverse discrimination at the expense of trying to make a competitive academic environment after centuries of truly endemic discrimination. For centuries white people had virtually exclusive access to learning. Black people were risking their lives just learning to read. After white people have taken full advantage of their concerted endeavor to keep black people ignorant, the black community is now invited to compete fairly and squarely based on nothing but a numeric test score.

But if we can throw a football sixty yards with laser like precision or shoot a three pointer from half court the dominant community would be more than happy to let us in the door regardless of any number on a test score. The bold face audacity of manipulation and exclusion that the dominant community continues to exercise in order to keep the black comunity in check is truly amazing.