Affirmative action is the practice, usually by institutions, of giving preference to racial minorities or women when hiring employees, giving awards, or deciding whom to admit. You knew that, but we like to start with the basics. Affirmative action arose out of a desire to bring minority groups into institutions and professions that had traditionally been dominated by white males. It first appeared after the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s as an attempt to accompany the new legal equality gained for minorities with social and economic equality.

The first kind of affirmative action involved setting racial quotas, deciding on a specific number or percentage of members of a given minority group that a company or institution had to accept. These racial quotas improved diversity to some degree and inspired some great jokes on All in the Family, but were considered too crude by many people. Now affirmative action usually involves using racial, gender, socioeconomic background, and/or sexual orientation status as a positive factor in hiring or admissions decisions. Affirmative action policies pop up all over the place, but we're going to focus on its use in the college admissions process.

1. LEARN SOME BACKGROUND ON THE ISSUE

Racial quotas for public colleges were declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in the case of Bakke v. California. Since then, public colleges seeking to increase diversity have used other types of affirmative action. While private universities have more freedom in their admissions decisions, they generally find that other affirmative action policies are a better way of achieving diversity than quotas because they allow for greater flexibility and more fairness.

Affirmative action in the college admissions process has, in the decades following Bakke, been primarily an ethical rather than a legal issue. So long as the decision process did not employ strict racial quotas, colleges could choose to accept whomever they wanted. This is changing however; California's Proposition 209, passed in 1996 with 54% of the popular vote, prohibits any use of racial preferences in government hiring and public school admissions. More than a dozen states are considering similar legislation, and Federal courts in Texas and elsewhere have also brought into question the legality of using race as a determinant in academic admissions.

Insofar as the question is an ethical one, the bulk of the disagreement is over whether or not affirmative action increases fairness in the admissions process. Additionally, the debate over affirmative action raises the question of what role diversity in student bodies plays in both the academic mission of a university and in the quality of life on campus.

Affirmative action in evaluating college applicants has supporters and opponents on both sides of the political spectrum, but generally speaking it is more popular among liberals than among conservatives. To help you make your own decision about the issue we've listed the arguments for both sides. Let's start by looking at some of the arguments in favor of affirmative action.