How biased NPR was in the introduction?
anonymous-114 04/27 69104.5/117
(By Chunyan Li)
NPR, I have been listening to you for many years, but your intro is misleading to say the least-- Asian Am enrollment only went from 32% to 35.9%, while Black enrollment went up from 4% to 4.3%. What are your definitions of "plummeted" and "soared"?
In addition, SCA5 passed along party lines in the senate, with no Republican support, so why do you single out Asians as the ones opposing such a politically motivated bill? It is unconscionable for a public radio to stir up racial conflict like this! You've lost my trust as an unbiased program.
Plenty of suggestions have been made after SCA5 passed the senate, including effective mechanisms to address the K-12 issue, which should've been politicians' real focus. The merit, harm and necessity of affirmative action is an ongoing debate, yet I caution the media when it uses such a debate in a misguided effort to generate controversy along racial lines.
With numbers telling the truth, there is no basis for a "principled conversation about whether a racially diverse college-educated population is important" (LA Times above), because CA systems have achieved diversity through various means.
See numbers below: "It is indisputable that both in absolute numbers and percentages, minorities that attend the University of California have increased and exceed the levels of minority admissions from the pre-Prop. 209 days. At the University of California in 1996 – the last year prior to Prop. 209’s adoption – blacks accounted for 4 percent of overall admissions (1,628); in 2013 they accounted for 4.3 percent of admissions (2,705); they are approximately 6.6 percent of the California population. Chicanos and Latinos comprised 14.3 percent of admissions (5,744) in 1996 and are 27.8 percent (17,450) of admissions in 2013; they make up about 38.2 percent of the population. Asians made up 32 percent (12,995) of admissions in 1996 and are 35.9 percent (22,536) in 2013; they make up about 13.9 percent of California’s population. Whites have plummeted percentage-wise from being 41 percent (16,465) of admissions in 1996 to 27.9 percent (17,516) in 2013; whites make up about 39.4 percent of the population."
"Although the share of underrepresented minorities in the UC system dropped from 20% before the ban to 18.6% in 1997, by 2008 it had rebounded to 25%, with an 18% rise in graduation rates among minorities. The numbers at the elite UC Berkeley and UCLA campuses have not fully recovered to pre-Proposition 209 numbers, but they have made considerable progress. Moreover, both were listed in U.S. News & World Report's Economic Diversity Among the Top 25 Ranked Schools for the 2011-12 year, with the highest percentage of undergraduates receiving Pell grants."
References:
[1] http://onpoint.wbur.org/2014/04/24/affirmative-action-college-california-race
[2] http://www.sacbee.com/2014/02/08/6138480/viewpoints-a-step-backward-on.html
[3] http://articles.latimes.com/2014/feb/07/opinion/la-oe-gratz-california-racial-preferences-20140207
