Question

Discuss the costs and benefits of affirmative action laws. Overall, are affirmative action laws effective?

You may use these or other section headings: 1. Introduction, 2. The problem, 3. Why the problem exists, 4. How to address the problem, 5. Conclusion, 6. Works Cited

Answer 1

I am trying to help you with data collected from some researchs.

1. Introduction

For more than four decades, social equity policies in America have continued to face legal, administrative, and political challenges. Responding to concerns for social equity and calls for action from the government, many laws and initiatives were specifically designed to provide equal opportunity and mobility for traditionally disadvantaged groups (i.e., minorities, women, and the disabled). Equal employment opportunity initiatives consist of statements that prohibit discrimination and support programs that investigate individual discrimination complaints. Political power and legal protection for these “protected groups” have evolved as a result of a three-tier process: equal employment laws, affirmative action laws and programs, and diversification programs (Klingner & Nalbandian, 1998).

Affirmative action programs expand educational and employment opportunities for “protected groups” by actively recruiting them into the organization. Organizations are then able to develop workforce diversification programs to focus on several areas (i.e., recruitment and retention, job design, education and training, benefits and rewards, and performance measurement and improvement) and encourage organizational change in its mission, culture, policies,
practices and productivity – all of which are vital to long-term organizational survival and effectiveness.

Problem

Advantage: Diverse Workplace
One of the major advantages of affirmative action is that this policy helps to create a more diverse work environment. Diversity, in turn, provides your company with two key advantages. First, it enhances your team's problem-solving capabilities by offering a wider array of possible solutions, based on an increased range of experiences among your staff.

Disadvantage: Creates a Stigma
One of the disadvantages of affirmative action in the workplace is that it can create a stigma that women and minorities at your company were only hired because of their gender or skin color. Some employees who are not minorities or women may believe that their colleagues did not merit their positions based on education and experience. In the workplace, this stigma can translate into questioning the job competence of minority and female employees. As a result, some of your employees may not give their co-workers the same respect they would someone they believe has the proper qualifications.

Disadvantage: Perception of Reverse Discrimination
One potential disadvantage of affirmative action in the workplace is the reality or perception of reverse discrimination. In essence, those opposed to affirmative-action programs claim that the programs penalize those from the historically dominant group – generally white males – even when they possess the appropriate qualifications for a given job.

EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE ON AFFIRMATIVE ACTION: UNIVERSITY ADMISSIONS
The magnitude of the redistribution of university admissions from white males to minorities or women generated by Affirmative Action has been disputed. On the one hand, test scores of those admitted are considerably higher among whites than minorities across the full spectrum of colleges and institutions. For example, Datcher Loury and Garman (1995), using data on college attendees from the NLS High School Class of 1972, report that the gap in median SAT scores at colleges attended by whites relative to colleges attended by blacks was 83, while the gap between scores of the white and black students in the data set was 243. In other words, the gap in average school quality attended by whites and blacks is much smaller than the gap in their performance on these tests. And among whites attending colleges with median SAT scores of 1,000 or greater, 35% had scores of 1,000 or greater; but this percentage was only 10 among blacks.

ECONOMIC COSTS
The onslaught of poorly educated, mainly Hispanic, immigrants has stymied good faith efforts of low-income Americans—minority and White alike—to climb up the economic ladder.

If contracts were awarded to the lowest qualified bid, discrimination would not enter the picture. Firms that pay minority and female workers less than their “marginal product” would lose qualified workers—and their competitive advantage—to non-discriminating competitors. Eventually they would fold.

The Bush White House seems immune to this point, however. Using Clinton-era standards, the Commerce Department has labeled industries awarded roughly three-quarters of all federal contracts—a truly staggering sum—guilty of discrimination, thereby making female- and minority-owned firms in these industries eligible for a 10-percent bid shelter.

Conclusion

Affirmative Action in admissions to elite colleges and universities, as well as many graduate programs, does have large relative effects on the representation of minorities in these programs, even if the overall numbers of positions redistributed to them remain modest.
The replacement of race-based Affirmative Action policies in university admissions with a different set of practices – such as those based on family income or class rank within high schools would likely reduce the presence of minorities on selective college campuses, in some cases
quite substantially. At the same time, they would do little to improve the overall numbers of positions for whites, or the average quality of students.
On the more controversial issue of whether Affirmative Action lowers efficiency, our review of the evidence paints a more complex picture. In the labor market, there is virtually no evidence that the qualifications or performance of females lag behind those of males because of Affirmative Action. In contrast, the credentials of minorities often lag behind those of their white
counterparts – in part because they lag behind in the population, and in part because of the preferential admissions and hiring policies generated by Affirmative Action. But evidence of weaker performance in the labor market on the part of minorities who benefit from Affirmative Action is much more limited. Apparently, many companies can offset most of the expected performance shortfalls of those whom they hire through a variety of practices that include improved recruitment and screening, greater training efforts, and better evaluation activity on the job. And there is also evidence of positive “externalities,” or external social benefits, from Affirmative Action in certain sectors – such as medical care, in which minority physicians are more likely to provide care to minorities and the poor than are white physicians.

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