Jake Bustamante Journal #3

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/110862/data-mining-the-ineffective-future-affirmative-action-in-education#

The first source I found was interesting in that it looked at Affirmative Action through a technological standpoint. The debate whether to end Affirmative Action has been going on for the majority of our lives and many courts have banned racial preferences for students going to universities. After the university of Texas and the University of California were unable to get enough diversity through alternative means, a new plan was a adopted called data mining. Advertisements companies use data mining to calculate the potential socioeconomic status of a resident living in a certain area. The more data collected, the more a company will know about one's socioeconomic status and race. I learned that the College Board adopted this technique to search for potential students using algorithms from a program called Descriptor Plus, giving colleges the edge in searching for diversity. The program takes "clusters" of neighborhoods that encompass certain groups and gives them priority without relying solely on race. This is because there is a factor of misrepresented students that is taken into account.

http://aer.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/01/14/0002831212470483.abstract

In this article, I learned that when Affirmative Action is withdrawn, not only does the diversity of undergraduate students decrease, but the graduate students population's diversity dwindles as well. Some of the most important fields are being affected in this lack of diversity, making the United States unable to "compete effectively in a global market". The studies that are suffering the most from this change are engineering, the natural sciences, and social sciences, three critical areas of study where jobs are competitive after one finishes their academic career. I also learned that there is currently a court case in process called Fisher v. University of Texas, Austin in which the Supreme Court will debate whether race should be a factor in a student's acceptance to an institution of higher learning. Also, eight states have banned the use of Affirmative Action, even though legally, it is allowed to be practices, albeit under strict guidelines.