Affirmative action goes beyond merely eliminating discrimination against minorities, but also creates new opportunities for them by compensating today's minorities for the past acts of discrimination on the members of their minority group. It is nowhere stated in the United States constitution that society has to compensate minorities today for actions of the past, which today's minorities haven't lived through.
In the United States today, there isn't segregation like there was back when Congress passed these statutes. There aren't "all white schools" or "all black schools" in today's society, so why the need to keep qualified students from achieving higher education in America's universities and colleges? These institutions shouldn't allow under-qualified students into their educational empire to meet a quota, just to make their college appear to be "diverse". Several Supreme Court cases have involved these matters in the past decade: California vs. Bakke and Hopwood vs. State of Texas. In Bakke, a white male brought suit against the University of California at Davis Medical School on the grounds that in denying his school admission they discriminated against him on the basis of race. Bakke's case went in front of the U.S. Supreme Court and Bakke was accepted into the university, however, he didn't succeed in getting affirmative action declared unconstitutional. This was due to the fact that the court only rejected the procedures of the institution because it used both quotas and separate systems of admissions for minority students (Lowi, Ginsberg, and Shepsle 146). The court then set restrictions on how universities could use affirmative action, by saying that they still could take minority status into consideration, but they had to be careful with their usage of quotas. They could use quotas on situations in which previous discrimination was present and where quotas were used as guidelines for diversity than a ratio.
