We get to exactly where we are today.

The idea that’s gripping the nation today is diversity. Every company, university and government agency is just itching to make itself more colorful. But at what price?

I was once told point blank by my high school college advisor that it would simply be easier for me to obtain admission into a school if I were a more exotic ethnicity. I’ve heard of advertisements where the token disabled employee has actually been visibly photo-shopped into the picture. I’ve been told stories of admissions and scholarships that have been rescinded simply because someone checked the wrong box on their application. But, I’ve also been told stories of people who feel as if they’ve been granted an honor they didn’t deserve just because of their race, and of people who feel marginalized not because of their minority status but because other people think they’ve achieved their accomplishments only because of the color of their skin. Despite the fact that only about 25 percent of Fordham’s undergraduate population identify as members of a minority group, 100 percent of us have been affected by the changing ideals of color in the world of higher education.

With programs like Affirmative Action, which seek to level the playing field by giving unwarranted advantages to certain people based solely on superficial criteria such as race and ethnicity, the diversity-mania monster continues to be fed large and juicy meals. While the admirable intentions of programs such as these were originally and ideally to obtain equality, the results have fallen incredibly far from the mark. Instead of actually fixing the real problems of inequality that we are facing in the U.S. today, they merely create the illusion of equality.

The constitutionality of Affirmative Action has flip-flopped wildly since its enactment, a trait that should certainly point to something fishy. The Supreme Court has upheld Affirmative Action policies at the University of Michigan Law School, but not at the University of Texas Law School. Quotas were quickly deemed unconstitutional (in the 1978 case of the Regents of the University of California vs. Bakke), while the much more vague and enigmatic “educational diversity” was declared to be in accordance with the constitution in 2000 with Gratz vs. Bollinger.

In my opinion, however, all of the legal nonsense surrounding Affirmative Action is simply a waste of time. Instead of artificially correcting differences between ethnicities by boosting people up at the ripe age of 17 or 18, we should be working to close the gap by implementing better primary and secondary education in regions of our nation where funds are vastly lacking. By providing better public education in areas that are populated mostly by minorities (which have been historically lacking in funding) we can give people the tools they need to succeed own their own in our capitalist society.

While handing out fishes did, indeed, seem to be an easy solution at the time when Affirmative Action was implemented, I think that it is about time that we start teaching people how to fish now that we have a better understanding of the problem. Affirmative Action is outdated, unclear and frustrating for all. It tells minorities that they were not, in fact, “created equal” but require assistance from those above them. Now, with more foresight than we’ve shown in the past, we should change our policies and live up to our Declaration of Independence by treating all people the way in which they were created: as equal.