Affirmative Action in Higher Education Essay

Equality.   Most Americans would tell you they wish that all people were given the same opportunities, no matter what race, class, or gender they were.   However, talk is cheap.   Even though most of American society says they want equality, people do not agree on how to achieve this equality.   There have been many ideas on how to achieve equal opportunity, but the American society has a long way to go to achieve equality.   One recent idea that has been tried is affirmative action.   Though it is said to help promote equality, it is a highly debated topic, with both sides having strong arguments on the issue.   However, affirmative action has many more benefits than problems, such as promoting fairness, usefulness for any minority, helps make up for past wrongs, and promotes equality.
The way affirmative action is supposed to work is to choose a minority when there are equally qualified candidates for a job or admission to a college or university.   Many higher education facilities use this idea in their admission process.   If an African-American and a Caucasian were equally qualified, the African-American would be chosen to promote diversity.   This can be used not just in terms of race, but also in any other type of inequality, such as gender gaps.   Affirmative Action is mainly used in education, the workplace, and sometimes in other areas.  
Though it is hard to place a specific date on when affirmative action started, a modern beginning in this idea was established in 1954 Brown v. Board of Education supreme court ruling that declared that segregation was illegal in the public education system.   Ten years later the Civil Rights Act of 1964 stated that discrimination based on race or sex was illegal in education and in the workplace. (Lyobe)   The next major occurrence was the Regents of the University of California v. Bakke.   This case ended the quota system of choosing applicants for higher education but still allowed the idea of racially based admissions policies....