Master of Public Administration: overview and career paths

Criminal Justice - Affirmative Action

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION COUNTERARGUMENT

Affirmative action is a fair method of achieving equal employment opportunity for minority groups and women.

At the time that affirmative action programs were first introduced after the Civil Rights era, they were justified as a necessary means of rectifying some of the inequitable hiring practices that were directly attributable to the pre-Civil Rights era of American history (Healey, 2003). However, almost half a century later, racial, ethnic, and gender equality in society and in the modern vocational environment no longer maintain discriminatory policies; therefore, artificial mechanisms for homogenizing the makeup of the American workforce are neither justified nor necessary.

In principle, the affirmative action approach undermines the interests of professional business organizations by (in effect) prohibiting employers from selecting the most qualified employees available. Whereas the mandatory hiring of a candidate from a racial, ethnic, or gender minority group may not result in the selection of less qualified individuals where all candidates are equally experienced and skilled, it more often is the case that the lowering of objective hiring standards and qualification criteria does, in fact, prejudice the hiring process against the applicant who is most deserving of the position on the merits.

This is particularly true in employment fields such as law enforcement, fire fighting, construction, and in any other vocational environment requiring specific hiring criteria like physical performance tests. Certainly, hiring practices in all fields should be completely neutral with respect to race, ethnicity, and gender and discrimination against minorities must be absolutely prohibited. On the other hand, opponents to such practices point out that achieving that goal through artificial means like lower scoring requirements on exams specifically designed to measure the necessary skills and physical abilities that are essential to the job attempt to do so in a manner that lowers the performance of the organizations involved (Shaefer, 2002).

Furthermore, whereas the purpose of affirmative action programs in employment is to even the playing field for victims of discrimination originating in previous generations, one of their unintended consequences is to perpetuate discriminatory attitudes on the part of coworkers. In that regard, better qualified applicants for employment naturally develop resentment for anyone perceived to have benefited from unfair hiring practices. Likewise, in vocational environments where physical size and strength are relevant attributes of employment qualification, such as military, law enforcement, and firefighting (Schmalleger, 2008), relaxation of those standards for the exclusive purpose of increasing the proportion of females in the field reduces the quality of service and unfairly places additional burdens and risks on qualified employees.

Similarly, in the field of higher education, the lowering of achievement test requirements and high school performance standards dilutes the quality of the makeup of students whose institutions are compelled to select students by virtue of any criteria or characteristic other than those directly related to academic performance. One of the primary justifications for affirmative action in higher education has been that the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and other similar tools used to determine academic potential at the college and post-graduate level reflect a cultural bias in their makeup that benefits non-minorities. Even to whatever extent that may have been true when affirmative action programs were first conceived, opponents of affirmative action in education point out that the appropriate solution to that situation is to simply reconfigure the tests rather than to continue using the same flawed tests and then overcompensate after the fact (Halbert & Ingulli, 2007).

In education in particular, one of the effects of affirmative action in admissions is that it harms those minority students who would have qualified for admission without any artificial assistance. Specifically, public awareness of affirmative action in college admissions means that even the most highly qualified students of minority persuasion will be subjected to assumptions that their hard-earned academic credentials mean less than they would otherwise, because affirmative action programs in education taint their accomplishments.