リジィ子のCA在住お気楽エッセイ

ここに最初のエッセイを載せたのが８月の終わり頃。
あれからほぼ四ヶ月の月日が流れた訳で、
余興的に最後のエッセイも載せてみようと思う。
最初の物に比べると、その倍くらいになるので、
ちょっとずつ、この頃の近況のついでに載せてみよう。

話し変わって。

最近、５年前にユタの大学で書いたエッセイが出て来て、
それを読んで驚いたのだが、
「いやー、やっぱり成長したよなぁ」。

思えば、ここの所で勉強する事は止まっていた訳で、
しかし、読む事は継続して５年間意識的に続けて来たのが、
それだけでも無駄ではなかったんだな、と。
８月の終わり頃のエッセイでさえ、
この５年前の物よりは複雑さを増せる様になっていたのだから。

読む事と書く事は、本当に密接に関わり合っている事なんだ。
だから、これからも私は読むぞ。

色々と目標を立ててーーー、、、と。

さて。明日から開始。

＋＋＋

Cutting Off the Vicious Circle
Facing the Ironical Aspect of American Education that Class-based AA Has Shown

Although these words were unfamiliar for me at first, class-based affirmative action may be familiar to American people because the argument over the class-based AA has started several decades ago. Class-based AA is a relatively new edge of college admissions for students who belong to the lower-income class. In other words, class-based AA is a kind of regulation that has been planned to help lower-income students to be admitted to prestigious universities. According to the research of William G. Bowen, the former president of Princeton, poor students do not have almost any preference over college admissions while athletes, alumni, and students who are suitable for the requirements of race-based AA are being given a leg up (Shea). If listening to only his complaint, class-based AA sounds really good; however, we carefully need to ponder what this affirmative action would bring to our society. Although it is thought to be a “booster” to lower-income students, class-based affirmative action in fact distorts meritocracy and merely brings new inequality to our society.

We have believed for a long time that college admissions should be about meritocracy, such as previous schools’ grades, test scores, and individuals’ abilities; however, in the latest days, something against this belief seems to happen.

According to Bowen, almost all 19 institutions, including Bowdoin, Williams, and University of Virginia, that Bowen and his crews researched say that they treat lower-income students exactly the same as wealthy students. It means that if there are a poor student with a GPA score of 4.0 and a SAT score of 2000 and a wealthy students with the exactly the same scores, they will have the same possibility of admissions. At first sight, the response from those institutions seem to meet the conditions of meritocracy, but as the previous indication of Bowen, athletes, alumni, and minorities actually receive preference from those institutions―“In contrast, recruited athletes had, on average 30 percentage-point admissions advantage. Black and Latino students had a 28 percentage-points advantage, while legacy students got a 20 percentage-point bread” (Shea). Moreover, Bowen’s research says that “For poor students (who, incidentally, graduate from selective colleges at the same rate as the students body as a whole): nada” (Shea).

つづく。