Most people have a flawed understanding of affirmative action and that only fuels opposition. Many people think that if a White person (using race, but can apply to other sociological categories as well) and a minority apply to the same university, the minority should be admitted. Affirmative action says that if a White person and minority apply to the same university and are both equally qualified, the minority should be admitted (some cases also implement a quota system).


With that being said, I feel as if affirmative action is only a Band-Aid solution. We need to give every child a chance to succeed in primary and secondary education so that when she or he gets to higher education, she or he won't need affirmative action to be a competitive applicant.

We need to better fund and train our teachers, we need to reduce class sizes, we need to provide more funding for art programs in our schools to balance our mental development, we need to provide more funding for after-school programs, we need to provide funding so that any child wishing to go to preschool has this opportunity, we need to stop bipartisan support for nonsensical acts such as No Child Left Behind, we need to have more high schools provide more AP classes, and we need to have free public higher education.

Yes, we need to promote marginalized social groups, which is the underlying principle of affirmative action. However, affirmative action is only a good short term solution; we should not count on it to solve our problem. We need systemic change to solve our problem.