Charlotte Allen at Minding the Campus explores the problems created when educational institutions “target” women and minorities for recruitment as a business strategy:

Why is it admirable to “target” women and minorities for some educational programs but a violation of federal civil right laws to “target” them in others?

That’s the question that must be asked about a federal lawsuit filed by seven Mississippi women, five of them African-American, against for-profit Virginia College, a chain of 25 for-profit campuses in the Southeast.  All seven women used federal student loans at the college’s Jackson, Mississippi, campus to obtain degrees in such fields as medical assisting and phlebotomy. Their complaint against Virginia and its parent company, Educational Corp. of America, says those degrees are now worthless. It charges fraud and breach of contract along with other wrongdoing, and faults the college for pitching its advertising and recruitment to blacks and women.

The result, according to their lawsuit, is a student body at Jackson that is 89 percent African-American and 80 percent female. The complaint says: “Defendants are engaged in a scheme of specifically targeting African-Americans by creating advertisements that primarily use African-Americans as models, purchasing advertising time during daytime programming and late night programming, employing mostly African-Americans as admission officers and advertising mostly in African-American neighborhoods.”

The complaint argues that “targeting African Americans and women to take out loans” constitutes “reverse redlining,” a violation of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Equal Credit Opportunity Act. One of the plaintiffs, Dianna Bond, who borrowed $15,000 to finance a degree from Virginia College that she says is worth nothing, told the Chronicle of Higher Education that she chose the institution after she saw a commercial for it featuring an African-American woman described as a mother–just like Bond.

Needless to say, the allegations are denied.

Allen sums up by asking:

What if Virginia College hadn’t “targeted” black applicants by featuring black women in its advertising? Wouldn’t that, too, have been racist? It’s damned if you do, damned if you don’t under this country’s increasingly illogical affirmative-action policies, where it’s sometimes very good to target women and minorities and sometimes very bad.