Does Affirmative Action fit under the values of FIRST

[Andrew Schreiber]

Originally Posted by IKE

I would ask folks to temper their discrimination concerns with the understanding that not all programs have the same goals. Madison and several others are trying to help show that some times those factors come into play more than you might think.

Both Purdue ME and a previous employer had programs that sounded really neat. You got to take products apart and reverse engineer them. The employer based one even had a competition format. The traditional "best candidate" would be someone with a ton of experience working on these sorts of things, but that was the exact opposite of the programs goals. These programs were specifically designed to help young engineers gain hands on experience. The organizers of the programs did not care who won. Their goal was to make these individuals into better engineers.
Both of these programs discriminated on age (or year in school) and experience. Groing up on a farm working on tractors, and building cars during afterschool projects actually made me a poor candidate for the program as I had those experiences already.
There were also a lot of older engineers I felt should have gone through the program, but the company wanted to invest in those they may get the most return on, which were not the folks ready to retire.

If your goal is to win matches... Pick the most capable candidate. If your goal is to change lives... Sometimes you pick those that need the most change. Different teams have different goals and different measures of success. Often it is not about how many points made on the scoreboard, but the points you have made in the students mind (compassion, sportmanship, professionalism, work ethic....).

Then that isn't affirmative action. That is having a certain set of criteria. To me affirmative action has been having a different set of criteria for two otherwise identical applicants. Take me and my hypothetical twin, we both have a degree, same family, same life experiences.

Let's assume that we have the same GPA and did everything together so have the same level of experience. You can only hire one of us. If you decide that my twin gets the job because she is female I object to that.

Now, if you have a person identical to me in every way except they don't have any experience with FIRST I have no objection to them being chosen for a team over me if your criteria are to impact the lives of your students.

For the most part I'm fine with teams choosing whatever criteria they want (I'm a pizza kind of guy, put whatever you want on yours but don't tell me what to put on mine). The extent of this is when a team says "we only want girls" or "we only want students from X ethnicity" and turn away otherwise qualified applicants who have no where else to go.

That being said, I'm a middle class white male so my opinions on anything dealing with racism or sexism are immediately based on ignorance. (Thank you Social Psychology professor for THAT line)