Midwest Affirmation

I am currently reading And Still We Rise: The Trials and Triumphs of Twelve Gifted Inner-City Students. In the book, Miles Corwin, a Los Angeles Times reporter, follows twelve students in an inner-city high school's gifted magnet program throughout their senior year. It has proved to be an interesting read, very though provoking, and inspiring. It is of particular interest because the students attend Crenshaw High School, a school members of my team served at during our second round AmeriCorps NCCC project last year in Los Angeles. Crenshaw is a place I have seen firsthand and experienced through the members of my team that spent countless hours there tutoring and mentoring students, just like those in the book.

The book follows gifted students who are graduating in 1997, a year before affirmative action in the state of California's public university systems is abolished. According to wikipedia, affirmative action, a policy in place since 1978 in the state of California, "refers to policies that take factors including "race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation or national origin" into consideration in order to benefit an underrepresented group, usually as a means to counter the effects of a history of discrimination." (I can't believe I just cited wikipedia. Please don't tell any of my previous professors.)

In Chapter 9, Corwin cites several examples of "unofficial" affirmative action that have been discreetly (or not so discreetly as the case may be) happening in college admissions offices for generations and giving distinct advantages in the admissions process to legacies (children of alumni), athletes, the wealthy, the well-connected, friends of the dean, and students from underrepresented states (p. 132-133). Having discussed preferential treatment in the admissions process ad nauseum in graduate school, I wouldn't have given this list a second thought until they started listing underrepresented states: North Dakota and Nebraska. Bam. There it is. Being from Nebraska, an underrepresented state, could give an applicant a distinct advantage in applying for college. I never thought that being from Nebraska would have give me an advantage in the college admissions process. Colleges and universities want to establish a national presence and having students from underrepresented states, like Nebraska, helps them do just that. While I'd like to think that I'd gotten in to undergrad and graduate school entirely on my own merit, now I can't help but wonder.

For undergrad, I more than met the admissions qualifications, but for graduate school, now I'm wondering if my Midwestern roots somehow tipped me over the edge. I decided at the last minute that I wanted to abandon my law school plans to apply for higher education programs. I hadn't taken the GRE, wanted to be in a large metropolitan area, and waited until January to apply, so my list of potential schools was pretty short. NYU and Columbia. I didn't get in to NYU so the decision was made for me. While I often chastised my graduate program for not being the "touchy-feely" student affairs program I thought I'd applied for, now I've found that I learned more about the things that could actually help impart change in the education system, the things that I'm actually passionate about, than I would have at another graduate program.So for that I am grateful.

Now that I am a graduate of Auburn and Columbia Universities, if my future children decide to apply, then they could very well be given preferential treatment. So who knew that being from Nebraska could have helped not only me, but my children that don't even exist yet.