AA, as public policy gets discussed a lot. The effects of it usually do not. And frankly, the effects of AA aren't as too terribly severe in many fields because what people do in those fields aren't a matter of life and death.
Unfortunately, this isn't the case with medicine (the field I'm entering) and aviation (the field I'm leaving). In both these careers, when mistakes are made, people die. Neither field can afford the questionable competence of those who are let in by any standard other than that of merit. Do adcoms regularly disregard this and admit students based on varying levels of melanin or different plumbing? Of course - the statistics I posted at the start of this thread bear that out. Do airline HR departments do the same when they hire pilots? Unfortunately yes.
While such things may let white liberals feel good, it does a disservice to everyone else involved. Individuals who get ahead in life because standards have been relaxed end up finding themselves in environments that they aren't ready to handle.
United Airlines, for instance, took a very aggressive stand in hiring women in the 1980's. Typically, a pilot has to have around 3000-5000 hours of flight time, with a significant portion of that in jet or turbojet aircraft, to be competitive for major airline interviews. Unfortunately - just as there aren't thousands of black applicants with 30's on their MCATS - there weren't that many experienced women pilots around. So United did what medical school adcoms are doing - they hired whatever women they could get so long as they held pilot licences and had a few hundred hours of experience.
Mind you, there's nothing wrong with experienced female pilots - just as there is nothing wrong with experienced male pilots. But United's approach - "we must have diversity" - led them to hire inexperienced female pilots who were not ready to do the job.
Typically after you are hired, you go through a month of ground school, a month of simulator training, and then are released to fly with "line check captains" for what is called "initial operating experience." Typically, this lasts for two weeks. United's quota hires - for this is what they were - got stuck in this IOE process. They couldn't be released to fly the line because the check captains realized that with no experience they were dangerous to passengers. They couldn't be fired because United would be sued.
...the other shoe: a friend of mine, a 727 driver for us, was returning home to Chicago from Saint Louis on a UAL 727 some years ago as our flight had left. It is pretty common procedure on the 727 to taxi on two engines to save fuel and start the third engine prior to takeoff. A multitude of checklists - plus plain simple observation - back you up on this so there's never an excuse to 'forget'. Anyhow, this is what this UAL - all female - flight deck crew did. They shoved up all three throttles for takeoff with engine #3 OFF. Needless to say my friend, ever the observant jumpseater, jumped out of his seat and pulled all three throttles back to idle. Had he not done so, he, and up to 125 people would be dead. Understand that this is a mistake that has never been made in the annals of NTSB investigation by an airline crew. It's so egregious, it woud be akin to a doctor walking into an ER and shooting, not treating, a patient.
Regardless of the philosophical justifications offered up for AA policies, they always end up working themselves out as quotas, and quotas have consequences. In medicine and aviation, the consequences are measured in terms of lives lost and this is why AA policies have no business being in either field of endeavor. As Ayn Rand said, "You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality."
(By the way - I'm all for getting as many AA admissions into law schools as we can...we need more bad lawyers!
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