Jack and Diane are both called in for an interview. The personnel officer notes that both seem intelligent, hard working, and in need of the job. Because of Jack’s experience in advertising and higher grade point average, he ranks slightly higher than Diane.

Who gets the job? That depends on the company they are interviewing with. In the past Jack would have received the job right away, regardless of rating. Two main reasons being because Diane is a woman, and because she is black. Until recently the firm wouldn’t have even considered hiring her, except possibly for a cler

Another alternative is to help only those who come from a dysfunctional background. Many hope that this would help a lot of the same people while being more widely approved. Since a higher percentage of blacks come from bad backgrounds, they would benefit from this action the most (Bergmann 170). Still, others say that all that needs to be done is to enforce laws against discrimination. If the government could achieve this, we wouldn’t need affirmative action in the first place. Too much of the discrimination that goes on is done behind closed doors. This makes it very hard to enforce laws against discrimination (Bergmann 172).

These lawsuits usually hurt the firm more by awarding a lump sum to each plaintiff. Class action suits also raise more publicity against the firm, hurting its reputation.

In one study of a private ivy league college corporation, it was found that “above 90% of the black applicants scored higher on the SAT than the average black test taker”(Bowen and Bok 19). These students also scored 75% higher than the average white test taker (19). On the other hand, the white applicants scored over 95% higher than the national average of white test takers (19). These white applicants scored an average of 1284, which is 186 points higher than the black applicants (1098) (21). Only 29% of the black applicants achieved scores over 1200. Over 75% of the white applicants achieved this mark (21). How can a schools admissions office, which is trying to increase diversity, come up with the answers to the obvious question?

Some topics in this essay:
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