Affirmative Action

Racial discrimination is an action that has plagued our country for many years. It has prevented many of our overly qualified citizens from the type of employment that they desire and quite frankly it is also the type employment that they deserve. Within the confines of our society, the idea of affirmative action has been introduced with regards to “level the playing field,” in the sense that everyone within our society should have an equal opportunity in gaining employment, education and things of that nature. An argument that comes with this subject matter is that affirmative action is solely based on ethnicity which in turn creates the idea of “reverse discrimination,” so now another problem has stemmed from an already existing one. To essentially avoid these problems, it has been suggested that affirmative action should be based on one’s socio-economic standing. When reviewed, this base for affirmative action seems to be the most promising. Socio-economic status should become the sole base for affirmative action.

When looking at college financial-aid as a whole, it is true that the classes to which the most aid is given is the middle and upper-middle classes respectively. The reason being is that academic institutions believe that students who represent this class are the most likely to prosper and this argument has been supported by research. With this given knowledge, in the eyes of any institution, it would only be logical to show preference to people of the middle class in terms its admission or financial aid. Here affirmative action has no influence by ethnicity or any other standards besides socio-economic status.

Race, as affirmative action’s current influence, enables more problems to occur. An important problem is the creation of “reverse discrimination,” which happens when the minority is favored to the point that the majority is favored less. It is said that they do not