Sandel's Arguments Against Affirmative Action

The first argument that supports Affirmative Action is about correcting the testing gap. According to some studies, black and hispanic students score lower as a whole than white students on standardized tests, like the SAT. Sandel gives the example of a student who attends a poor public school in the South Bronx scoring a 700 and a student who scored a 700 that went to an elite private school in Upper Manhattan. He says that the 700 SAT score from the student in the South Bronx means more than the 700 score of the student from Upper Manhattan. Sandel also discusses how assessing test scores in consideration to the students’ racial, economic and ethnic background doesn’t challenge the idea that places of higher education should admit those
Sandel says that this argument is for the common good, by this he means that it’s for the good of the school. “It holds that a racially mixed student body is desirable because it enables students to learn more from one another than they would if all of them came from similar backgrounds….the diversity argument maintains that equipping disadvantaged minorities to assume positions of leadership in key public and professional roles advances the university’s civic purpose and contributes to the common good.” (Sandel, 171). Even though this is one of the most used arguments for Affirmative Action, there are two objections to this argument; the practical objection and the principled objection. The practical objection questions whether or not the diversity argument is effective. The practical objection says that Affirmative Action will damage the self-esteem of minority students and will cause white groups to feel that they should get a break. The principled objection says using race as a factor in admissions is unfair because it violates the rights of other applicants who deserve to get in just as much because of their academic achievement but don’t get in because a student was accepted based on race