US Universities Should be Required to Give Preference to Applicants of Underrepresented Minorities

I know I messed up when I laid out the outline of the debate, but Pro said in the 1st round, “Everything has to shift half a round forward". Essentially, he accepted the format with everything shifted forward. That means the 2nd round for Pro was meant for: “Pro Opening Arguments (no rebuttals)”. The thing is, his whole response was basically rebuttals. If this doesn’t warrant automatic loss, it definitely warrants the conduct point being stripped from Pro. Economic Status: Pro’s argument here is useless. He chooses to focus just on medical schools, even though the resolution accounts for US universities as whole, including, but not exclusive to, medical schools. For this reason, I could leave everything here blank and most of my arguments would stand, but I’ll address his claims anyway. Pro starts off saying that medical schools give preference to poorer people. However, according to the resolution they’ll still have to give preference to URMs, so it still means rich Blacks and Hispanics will have certain advantages. Pro also asserts that giving preference to URMs is done to help patients (in medical school cases, still doesn’t come close to justifying it for other universities). However, Pro fails to explain why that is preferred. He provides no explanation why we should do that, when kids who may work a lot harder to try and get to med. school are rejected, for someone who perhaps didn’t work as hard. 1) Pro mentions that physicians may face racial bias. However, this study was done in a time when Affirmative Action was in action, so one could argue that it’s not even working. As shown last round, schools are much more generous to Blacks and Hispanics, so the med. schools are doing everything they can, yet the racial bias is still occurring. Perhaps these White Physicians went through med. school and simply thought the Black and Hispanic students wouldn’t have been accepted if not for racial AA. 2) Pro acts like without giving certain races preferences there’d be no Black doctors. If a minority patient wants a doctor of the same race, the same doctor likely would have just gone to a 2nd tier school (like a White person with similar grades would have) instead of a top tier school. If anything, there may be more Black doctors, since there’d be less Blacks dropping out from being mismatched (more on that in the 2nd argument). 3) Pro mentions that URMs work in worse areas generally. He doesn’t really explain why it’s relevant to the topic. 4) Pro also says having doctors of all races will create role models. This is a pretty minor issue, but again, it’s not like Black or Hispanic doctors will go away if race based AA is ended. Perhaps there’d be more, since the Black and Hispanic students would have a better chance at success in a university Finally, Pro accuses me of “think[ing] that having certain scores means that medical schools owe you admission.” He says after that, “Medical schools admit the people who they think will provide the most benefit to their future patients.” I won’t disagree with that. In fact, if Pro truly believes that, then his logic is not consistent. Let’s say there’s 10 spots for a med. school, and there are 10 great candidates, who the med. school admissions board think will be great care providers, but they’re all White or Asian. Meanwhile, there are 5 mediocre candidates, who the med. school think will simply be okay for their patients, but they’re all Black or Hispanic. According to the resolution Pro argues for, they’d have to reject some of the great White/Asian candidates for the mediocre Black/Hispanic students. They’d literally owe these mediocre students admissions, due to the resolution Pro’s arguing for, yet he accuses me of thinking med. schools owe some people admission. Mismatch Effect: Pro is basically trying to hijack the debate with his med. school info. I agreed that med. schools can be considered universities for the debate, but he’s trying to close the debate entirely in on them. By ignoring the majority of my claims, it’s essentially concession to them. Pro also doesn’t account for class rank at all, while I mentioned Blacks typically place towards the bottom in university classes last round and Pro provided no reason for us to assume it’d be different in med. school only showing that most Blacks don’t drop out. Not dropping out is not enough reason to assume that these Blacks are living up to the advantages given to them. Plus, 6.7% of Blacks dropping out compared to 0.7% of Whites is still concerning, and Black dropout rates would likely be a lot closer to White dropout rates if they weren’t being mismatched. Overall, Pro did absolutely nothing worthwhile to defeat this argument. All he did was show the wide majority of Blacks don’t drop out of med. school. That doesn’t account for how well they’ll do in the classroom or in a career as a result. Yet I showed data last round, looking at a wider range of schools, showing Blacks often are towards the bottom of their class, because they are being mismatched due to their race. Reverse Discrimination: Once again though, the resolution accounts for US universities as a whole. Asians: Let’s look back to one of Pro’s rebuttals to my 1st argument. “It ensures that doctors in training are not insulated in an environment of only white and ORM students”. How exactly is favouring Whites over Asians going to help that? There are barely any Asians in the US compared to Whites, so for an Asian to be over-represented, there’d need to be a lot less Asians than Whites. If more Asians became doctors over Whites, not much, if anything would change, all doctors wouldn’t all of a sudden be Asian. So why should a race who has and continue to face discrimination be favoured over the majority race?