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Here are some little known facts:

"After graduation recently, 2.5 million American seniors enrolled in either
a two-year or a four-year college. Almost a million did not. They were
overwhelmingly poor, male and white. Much to the surprise of social
scientists who traditionally have looked for educational problems among
minorities, low-income black and Hispanic men are more likely to go to
college right out of high school than white guys. So are young women of any
background, in fact."

Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A22619-2002Oct26.html

Meanwhile, get a load of this quota program from which Jesse Jackson's son Yusef (U.Va. Law '94) benefited:

http://www.ceousa.org/html/update/update.html

"A detailed, 50-page study released by the Center for Equal Opportunity
concludes that racial discrimination is widespread in Virginia law school
admissions. The report focuses on the three Virginia public law schools --
the University of Virginia, William & Mary, and George Mason University --
and reveals odds favoring black applicants as high as 731 to 1. To put it in
other terms: A student with an LSAT score of 160 and an undergraduate GPA of
3.25 had a 95 percent chance of admission into U.Va. if he or she was black,
but only a 3 percent chance of admission if white, Hispanic or Asian."

Liberals believe in institutionalized racial discrimination.

Conservatives believe in a society where people are judged not on the color of their skin, but on the content of their character.

The ethnic experience of immigrants to America was not monolithic with respect to all who are classified as white. Yet affirmative action assumes this to be so. It's been shown historically for example that German Americans and Jewish Americans have tended to excel academically. In other words, they've used academic advancement for social/economic advancement. The Irish and Italians on the other hand didn't typically use this route. By grouping them all together into the category of white you're discounting their different cultural/historical experiences in America and what effect that might translate to in terms of overcoming how well they may succeed academically or that it's a level playing field for all whites across the board. Affirmative action may have appeared to be a reasonable remedy for the legal, cultural and economic disadvantages suffered by blacks. Even to the point where one overlooked the "equal protection clause of the constitution." That overlooking was the first mistake, and once affirmative action became a racial spoils system for any group in this country claiming victimhood it lost any semblance of reasonableness.