Affirmative action does not, and never was intended to, mean giving one group preferential treatment over another. It means taking action to make sure that opportunities exist for people to compete rather than being shut out before they have a chance to start. It can mean, for example, recruiting for a vacant job in a "minority" newspaper in addition to the "regular" media or doing outreach in a predominately minority school to assure that students know about the availability of jobs. Quotas are another thing entirely, and so are hiring preferences. These have nothing to do with affirmative action and are, IMHO, wrong.

The same principles should apply to admission to higher education. That is, admission standards should be the same for everyone, as should be academic expectations, but affirmative action implies making special effort to attract and, as needed, pay for minority students.

BTW, I worked in affirmative employment for over 20 years, for the Federal (US) government (which is hardly the ogre that Bobert thinks it is) and I watched the workplace change tremendously over that time because of the positive efforts made by the government as an employer.

To address the three rather loaded choices given above:
It helps minorities get the equality they deserve. Doesn't everybody "deserve" an equal opportunity to demonstrate that they can do a job, without automatically being excluded because they aren't given a chance, often by simply not knowing that a job exists?

It hurts minorities by giving others the feeling of special treatment to minorities over caucasions. Well, besides the fact that some "minorities" who have been the targets of affirmative action programs are Caucasians, such as many Hispanics and the majority of America's working women, I don't think this is at all accurate. Affirmative action provides an individual with the chance to compete fairly, and I have rarely encountered a situation in which the best person for the job wasn't hired, regardless of his (or her) "minority" status, and most of the other applicants didn't recognize that the person hired was the best candidate.

It's purely a political idea thought up to pander for the votes of minorities. This is simple nonsense.

Affirmative action is the reason that my last boss, before I retired, was a woman and her boss was a Hispanic man. They were given opportunities to compete which did not exist 20 years before, when every senior manager was a white man, and they rose to the level in the organization that their personal talents permitted.