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Let me tell you about two people and you tell me which one should have gotten an advantage from the college admissions office. These are not fictional people.

Our first student grew up the daughter of multi-millionaires, both of her parents are lawyers and she enjoyed every privilege. She competed in show jumping horses and lived in a huge home with a stable on the property. She was very smart and worked hard and she went to the local high school for gifted students.

Our second student was born in the projects on 125th street in Harlem. After age eight he lived in Tucson in very poor neighborhoods. Their first house there was next door to a family where both parents and all of the kids were in a gang. They regularly broke into this kid's house, and the father was fond of threatening him with his shotgun for fun. His mom had health problems and her live-in boyfriend refused to get a job. They were extremely poor, he begged for leftover fruit in the school cafeteria and they got food from the produce company dumpster regularly. The teachers would take him and his brothers to the clothing pantry so that they would have clothes that fit. At the age of ten he set out to earn money for himself and got jobs cleaning for over twenty companies. He used the money to buy himself a bed so he did not need to sleep on the floor anymore, and a bicycle. At thirteen they moved to a new neighborhood where their neighbor held off the SWAT team with a shotgun for thirteen hours before giving himself up on cocaine trafficking charges. Out on bail the neighbor murdered his girlfriend with a kitchen knife.

He went to an elementary and junior high school where he never got any instruction in grammar, entering high school using no punctuation, paragraphs, or capitals. He was forced to teach himself math from the book because his teacher would just pull out a calculator and tell him to "push this button."

Despite all of that our second student also attended the local high school for gifted students, where he did just as well as our first student. Not having school books sometimes for up to the first month because he did not have the money to buy them also was a difficult issue for him in high school.

Which person should get an advantage from the college admissions offices? Which one did get an advantage? Since my friend Kim is an African American she got an advantage despite already having had every possible advantage since birth. I was the poor child and despite facing all of those challenges I got no advantage for admissions to college, because I am white.

This is a real example of how race based admissions and advantages can be unsupportable in their results. We must get race out of the equation. Use family income, educational background of the parents, real circumstances and not the lazy shorthand of race to determine who needs and deserves extra help at the college level.

Learn more about this author, Carmi Turchick.
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