You go to school to develop the skills needed to have a successful life, and for a lot of people, college is a part of that path. Getting into college entails many things such as test scores, GPA, work ethic, and the color of your skin. That last one might strike up a few questions- why in the world would a college need to know what race you are? To me, this question has one logical answer: it doesn’t. It is completely unnecessary to consider race in college admissions because it is unfair and is discriminatory against certain students.

Many colleges like to call racial consideration “Affirmative Action” (aka AA), and describe it as “the practice of taking race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, etc. into consideration in order to benefit the underrepresented group” (Hutchinson). It sounds nice on the surface, right? AA is meant to help create equal opportunity for everyone, but according to The Federalist, “It has been reduced nowadays to a mere vehicle towards greater diversity on superficial levels,” (Fang) meaning that all colleges seem to care about is the color of your skin. It benefits no one but them, making the college look more diverse, and keeping many brilliant people down just because they aren’t the preferred race.

According to the Berkeley Political Review, in order to balance the effects of racial bias in admissions, Asians need to score 140 points higher than White students, 270 points higher than Latino students, and 450 points higher than African-American students on the SAT. (Ayato) The fact that a certain race needs to score that much higher on a test to get into the same college is blatantly racist, and just shows how unfair Affirmative Action is. A lot of people argue that AA is beneficial to minorities because they aren’t as privileged as others, but we are fortunate enough to live in the United States, where everyone has the right to an education, so it mostly depends on how determined the person is to get one. While I do agree that there are some places in the United States where getting a good education is hard, and I do think that should be considered, but the way that colleges handle that is by assuming that all minorities come from those places (Ayato). It is unfair and offensive to both the minorities that actually work to get into good schools and to the non-minorities that come from poorer places.

Think about it, when applying for a college, would you really want to get into it just because of your race, and not how hard you worked to get there? Think about the other side too; imagine working as hard as you could, all 12 years of your school career, just to get rejected because you have the wrong colored skin. That would feel pretty bad, wouldn’t it? Working that hard and then not being able to achieve your dream for such a superficial reason. So reconsider this so-called “Affirmative Action”, because at the end of the day, isn’t it really a “Negative Action”?