Race should not play role in admission

Applying to colleges can be a very stressful time in a teenager’s life. It is one of the biggest decisions one will make leading into adulthood. Everyone has his or her dream school and every student needs all the help they can get in order to be accepted. However, students are getting cheated out of a fair admissions process because colleges are selecting students with considerable emphasis on ethnicity.

This admissions process begs the question: should a person’s race affect his or her chances of getting accepted to college? Everyone knows that a person’s race has no influence whatsoever on one’s intellectual capabilities or work ethic; therefore, race should play no role in admission decisions.

In a progressive age where people finally understand that judging a person by his or her race is inhumane, universities seem unable to grasp the fact that what they are doing is pure racism. All college applications, and scholarships too, have sections that ask for the applicant’s race. Even if individuals choose not to select an answer, college acceptance committees can simply discern ethnicities by surnames. Making matters worse, they clearly show in their polices that they try to formulate a diverse student body by making selections based on race. This signifies that college boards are ignorant of how biased their acceptance decisions are, as they do not make the slightest attempt to cloud the fact they approve/disapprove students partly on ethnicity.

Throughout the U.S. constitution, it is clear that no benefits or disadvantages of any kind can be granted due to a person’s race, and that all people are to be treated as equals in America. According to the 14th amendment, “no state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States” (www.law.cornell.edu). With that said, colleges cannot give minorities advantages, such as allowing for them to have a greater acceptance rate, because it is an asinine decision based on a person’s race.

America is steadily progressing as a country through accepting all races. Colleges are going in reverse. Discriminating against Caucasians and Asians is identical to the past when people have, and still do, discriminate against African Americans. What colleges are doing is still racist, the only thing that has changed is the target groups. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, racism is defined as a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities, along with the idea that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race (www.merriam-webster.com). Therefore to be racist does not only mean prejudice against a race, but also unequal treatment that favors one over the other.

Institutions want more diversity in their student body, which is why they give advantages to minorities. However, their diversity is artificial because they hand-pick specific minorities to populate the campus. If colleges want to diversify, they need to do it the natural way. America is known as the melting pot of the world and every day more and more minorities immigrate into the United States. It’s just a matter of patience, not racist practices, that can create diversity. Taking everything into account, students need to petition for a federal law that prohibits colleges to ask any questions about race in their applications, and ban using race as a factor for admission.