Affirmative Action: Good or Bad?

Student A gets a 2200 SAT score and maintained a 3.6 GPA throughout High School. Student B got a 1800 SAT score and had a 3.3 GPA throughout High School. They both apply for University X and only Student B gets accepted.

Whats the difference between them?
Student B is a minority and Student A is not.

Is that really fair?

Many people would say so. They say its reparations for all the suffering that minorities and women faced in the past getting a job and getting into college. But what if Student A was a poor white and Student B was a rich hispanic, black or other minority? Is it fair then? The same rules will apply to them anyway.

"In 1972, affirmative action became an inflammatory public issue. True enough, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 already had made something called "affirmative action" a remedy federal courts could impose on violators of the Act. Likewise, after 1965 federal contractors had been subject to President Lyndon Johnson's Executive Order 11246, requiring them to take "affirmative action" to make sure they were not discriminating. But what did this 1965 mandate amount to? The Executive Order assigned to the Secretary of Labor the job of specifying rules of implementation.

In the meantime, as the federal courts were enforcing the Civil Rights Act against discriminating companies, unions, and other institutions, the Department of Labor mounted an ad hoc attack on the construction industry by cajoling, threatening, negotiating, and generally strong-arming reluctant construction firms into a series of region-wide "plans" in which they committed themselves to numerical hiring goals. Through these contractor commitments, the Department could indirectly pressure recalcitrant labor unions, who supplied the employees at job sites.