From the Executive Director

SCA 5: A Serious Concern of Asians

By Janlee Wong, MSW

Recently an effort by Senator Ed Hernandez (D-West Covina) to restore Affirmative Action as one of the criteria to consider in college admissions was met with a firestorm of protest mainly from the Asian American community.

Some Asian Americans were outraged by what they believed to be an effort to put less than qualified candidates ahead of Asian American candidates for college admission to the “first-tier” schools such as Berkeley, UCLA, UC Davis, etc.

In this highly competitive world, it’s understandable that everyone must compete, and the best should rise to the top. We also live in a world that is one of a great divide between the haves and the havenots, the 1 percent and the 99 percent.

My parents’ culture was one of survival and to do so, you must get ahead of others. Yet, their culture also feverently wished for a strong China and a China of equality where no one starved to death and everyone had a decent living.

In America, we have free public education and one of the most accessible public higher education systems in the world. That’s because we believe that education is one of the keys to getting out of poverty and getting ahead. As social workers we can see how the cycle of poverty, the lack of capital and assets can keep people in poverty or keep people from getting ahead.

We believe in a system that levels the playing field so that everyone starts from the same starting point. That’s pretty idealistic for the uniqueness and diversity of our population. Clumsy as it is, public policy tends to gravitate to being the great equalizer. We see it in universal free public education and we should see it in public institutions of higher education.

While we should strive for accessible affordable public institutions of higher learning, we’re not there yet. Until we get there, we’ll need some form of public policy that levels the playing field and that could be Affirmative Action.