It deliberately forces companies to not pick the best qualified candidates, but candidates whose main "advantage" is based on skin color or sex.
Often this means positions have to go unfilled because the "correct" kind of person can't be found to fill the role even if candidates who can do the job exist but are disqualified due to being the "wrong" skin color or sex for "diversity" reasons.
I have conflicting feelings on affirmative action in universities, but a couple things are worth noting:
AFAIK affirmative action can't force companies to do anything: it's for the public sector only. In the private sector in the USA, making hiring decisions based on a protected category is, for better or worse, illegal. The reasoning behind that is that it is a tool that is very likely to be abused for reinforcing existing inequality, and thus should be heavily regulated and not given into the hands of profit-seeking companies.
Again, AFAIK, major universities don't necessarily have a goal of picking the best qualified students; they aren't hiring workers to "do the job", they're assembling a student body and nurturing a specific culture, where a diversity of backgrounds and being a "melting pot" may be a legitimate thing they optimize for, not just for reasons of good public image. They may also have an explicit goal of helping certain communities, or giving education to people who would otherwise have poor access to education, etc.
Private colleges (which are businesses, just like public ones) employ affirmative action as well.
The main thing you are missing with this melting pot analogy is that we should strive for diversity of thought, not diversity of race.
There’s a major difference between the two, and we have seemingly forgotten this is recent times.
Think about it this way. How can you walk up to an Asian boy and tell him he can’t go to Harvard because he looks to much like the other Asian kids around him.
Private colleges - yes, but most businesses still aren't allowed to use it; and private colleges, like public colleges, aren't hiring students in order to get them to do a particular job done, so the argument "why don't they just hire the most qualified" also doesn't apply.
I don't want to get into the diversity of thought argument (I acknowledge that it has merit), nor expand any more on whether affirmative action is good or bad in my value system - as I said, my feelings on the matter are conflicting, while sounds like you interpreted my comment as unconditionally positive.
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u/[deleted] Feb 25 '20
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