In today’s ultra-competitive, demanding world, prestigious colleges seek the perfect package in their student bodies—top scores, great grades, countless extra-curriculars and, of course, diversity. While an eclectic class is favorable, applicant race should not be considered in the college admission process.

Affirmative action is supposed to ensure equal opportunity for minorities who may have experienced poverty, racial discrimination or similar setbacks in the past. Generalizing for large groups of people, however, is inaccurate and unjust. These principles may have been appropriate decades ago, but we cannot make generalizations about someone’s relative wealth or upbringing by race alone.

Affirmative action does help two historically oppressed groups, blacks and Hispanics. However, Jews and Asians, making up one and four percent, respectively, of the United States population, receive no such benefits. Blacks, on the other hand, make up thirteen percent. Who is the minority here? A 2005 Princeton study found that certain groups actually are given the equivalent of extra points on an SAT just for belonging to a certain race. According to the study, while blacks receive a 230-point bonus, and Hispanics 180, Asian students gain negative 50 points in the college admission process. Asians are actually being punished for scoring highly.

Nowhere is the discrepancy more apparent than in PBS’s report that UC Berkeley’s white and Asian students score, on average, 300 points higher on the SAT than blacks and Hispanics there. Affirmative action risks denying a number of well-qualified white and Asian students in favor of less-qualified minority applicants.

According to UCLA professor Richard Sander, studies show that half of all black law students rank near the bottom of their class and are more likely to drop out or fail the bar exam. One explanation is that many minority students simply were not given the same level of high school education as their white and Asian counterparts. Sander contends that the number of new black lawyers in the U.S. would actually grow if affirmative action programs at law schools were ended. That ending affirmative action at top schools would greatly reduce diversity is a serious problem, yet one that must be addressed on the high school level—four years at an elite college will not rectify 13 years of poor public education. It is time to face the fact that Affirmative action hinders, not helps.