Questions of affirmative action are relevant not only in the academic world, but also in the career world. Most major Fortune 500 companies stress the importance of having a diverse employee pool. The more diverstiy that can be found within a company, will only bring further success in terms of economic return. With a ecclectic applicant pool, a company is better able to reach out to different consumer groups in order to sell their products or services. With America being such a large nation filled with so many people from different backgrounds, it is important to reach out to all of these potential buyers. Increasingly, many U.S. companies have also began to focus their interests in overseas sales and thus need a well-rounded group of employees that can foster these foreign relationships. By having many different ethnicities within one's company, not only makes business more productive but also makes a company look "better" in the eyes of investors or competition.

DiversityInc comes out with a list of the most diverse companies to work for every year. Recently, Ford Motors Co. was ranked number one followed by Fannie Mae and American Express. In the midst of this report however, Workforce magazine has released a statement stating that they do not believe that there is a direct correlation between a company making more revenue by having a diverse group of employees. It also states that companies spend on average about eight billion dollars a year trying to create these programs in order to recruit more minority applicants with not enough return upon investment. Although DiversityInc and Workforce disagree in terms of what a diverse employee pool will do for a company in terms of the dollar, they both agree that overall having a myriad of races within a company for honest reasons is definitely a good thing that should be more popular.

Whether one's true reason are really for helping employees to benefit from multicultural backgrounds or if it is mainly for economic gain, affirmative action in the workplace will still continue to play out as a professional tribulation with not nearly as much press coverage as university admissions policies. Nonetheless, it is debatable on whether a minority applicant would want to work in an environment that only wants them there for the color of their skin regardless of their intellectual capabilities or qualifications. It all comes down to priorities and what each individual values the most in terms of their role in society. A person using their race only to their advantage can seem unsettling to the large white majority but then again, aren't we all just trying to level the playing field?

It doesn't matter if you're black or white. This is a phrase that we all periodically hear and easily accept as true. However, this is not the case in today's society whether we choose to belive it or not. What is the percentage of one's race that decides which cateogry they fall under? This is important question to pose because there are many applying high school seniors who come from parents of different races. The 2000 census even indicated that over 37.7 million blacks stated they were from combinations of more than one race. The numbers are relatively lower for Latinos but it still raises what the necessary criteria are in order to receive admissions into a university or collect on scholarship money.

Is 50% enough? What about 25%? What percentage is necessary to make a person apart of one qualified group? It is shown through various statistics that the ivy league schools forcefully fight over the black and hispanic students that are at the top of their classes. It is a fierce battle to attract these distinguishable students due to the fact that they have worthy academic backgrounds but more importantly have a connection to a particularly defined race. What this leaves however is a "mixture" of kids who are not of one distinguishable race to be left in the dust - for reasons of non clear-cut racial divisions.

Many universities, in wake of the Supreme Court decision, are aleady looking into other possible alternatives to their affirmative action policies that would maybe help minority enrollment for those who have more than one race in their background. By implementing more minority recruiting efforts in conjunction with looking into an applicant's socio-economic background, the quest for diversity may be more efficient to those who do not seem to fit within one category. It seems like an oxymoron that we presently have an affirmative action programs designed to bring in a more diverse student population yet within these groups of minority applicants there are still divisions within that segment as well. In order to fight an overall division, we must first must fight the dvision within.