What does "better qualified" mean?

On November 1, 2012, I responded to an op-ed penned by Michael Kinsley regarding affirmative action. Kinsley was responding to a recent study suggesting that those admitted to prestigious law schools under affirmative action programs, and hence less qualified, would be better off going to universities with a less challenging curriculum.

Kinsley's piece challenged this assumption, and I agreed with most of what he wrote in this column. When he used the term "better qualified," however, to describe those non-affirmative action admissions, I could not keep silent.

My response to Kinsley's discounting of my qualifications, is reposted below. What do you think?


Re "Overthinking affirmative action," Opinion, Nov. 1

I was admitted to UCLA Law School in 1987, when it had an aggressive and effective affirmative action program. I take issue with most of white America's view that affirmative action lowers the bar for minorities in the admissions process, selecting us over "better qualified" applicants.

What qualifications are we talking about? I was a single mother in college and worked 40 hours a week. Thus, I had at least 55 hours a week that were unavailable for study, even though I also carried a full load and consistently had a high grade-point average.

So the real question is, if those applicants who were trust-funded through school had to do what I did to get to the same place, could they have done so?

Affirmative action is about assessing one's qualifications in ways that measure things other than GPAs and test scores.

Irene Daniel

Los Angeles