<p>Indicating your race on any college application is Entirely Optional!!</p>
<p>as this thread indicates </p>
<p>The Fastest-Growing Ethnic Category at Great Colleges: "Race Unknown" </p>
<p>You'll still have to do some tedious research. Many schools publish their Common Data Set; just Google "common data set" "a school name". Section C7 includes "Racial/ethnic status" and a check in either Very Important, Important, Considered or Not Considered. This is probably as close as you'll come to answering your question accurately. Have fun!</p>
<p>If you leave your gender as "unknown," colleges will just look at your name and either conclude that you are Asian, or, if your name is not clearly Asian, you will be considered an affluent white. It's not as if a "John Michael Parker" can mark "race unknown" and fool the admissions office into thinking he might be Hispanic or something.</p>
<p>What if you're Asian and your parents name you like Malcolm X or something, and then you put "Unknown"?</p>
<p>Having Malcolm X as your name could be construed as a negative thing too. It depends on what admissions officer you get.</p>
<p>I think more private schools use it more than public universities. That's really all I know though.</p>
<p>
[quote]
What if you're Asian and your parents name you like Malcolm X or something, and then you put "Unknown"?
[/quote]
Does this really apply to anyone?</p>
<p>While you can just not report your race, it's not going to do much good for you since only whites and asians have any reason not to report it. So instead of knowing that you're white or asian, they'll just assume you're white and asian and treat you in the same manner.</p>
<p>Public schools that are legally forbidden from it are all in California, Washington, Michigan, and Texas... maybe I'm unaware of others</p>
<p>Private schools that don't do it include Caltech... not sure of others.</p>
<p>I know a black girl with the last name Watanabe. She was adopted :D</p>
<p>MODERATOR'S NOTE TO "Affirmative Action" THREAD: </p>
<p>By repeated member request, this new thread asking for information will be merged into the main FAQ thread, where links or quotations can be found with lots of information. That's the general requested treatment of affirmative action threads here. </p>
<p>As a friendly reminder to all users of College Confidential, new and old, I'll mention that previous threads on a subject can be searched for with keywords using the "search" link at the top of most forum pages.</p>
<p>
[quote]
It's not as if a "John Michael Parker" can mark "race unknown" and fool the admissions office into thinking he might be Hispanic or something.
[/quote]
Bill Richardson is Hispanic...</p>
<p>
[quote]
If you leave your gender as "unknown," colleges will just look at your name and either conclude that you are Asian, or, if your name is not clearly Asian, you will be considered an affluent white.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>This is untrue. Since I last posted in this thread, I've been in a discussion of this issue with college officers who post in an email list about the Common Data Set and its data-collection practices. In the discussion with the college officers, I learned that the federal Department of Education is giving revised guidance to college officers about how to collect data on applicant, admittee, enrollee, and graduate ethnic categories (which is required by federal law). Colleges are required to ask, but students are NOT required to tell, and the colleges are discouraged from guessing if the students do not tell. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Students of higher education (and applicants to schools of postsecondary education) are treated as adults, and are explicitly permitted to decline to identify their ethnic or racial category.</p>
<p>It will be interesting to see what college application forms look like in the next admission cycle, because the federal Department of Education has given colleges until 2010 (that is, the fall 2010 entering freshman class admission cycle) to update their forms as to asking about student ethnicity. It's definitely the law that students will still be able to decline to state any ethnicity at all, and that colleges will continue to be allowed to report a category of "race/ethnicity unknown."</p>
<p>I have a question out of curiosity that's not really pertinent. If white/Asian child is adopted by an African-American or Hispanic couple, can the child choose to be African-American/Hispanic? I guess it comes to whether or not he/she has always identified him/herself as this or that, right?</p>
<p>You are correct that there is no hard and fast rule to define the "race" or "ethnicity" of a child who grows up in an adoptive family. Because I live in the state that appears to have more international adoptions than any other, I am very aware of this issue.</p>
<p>Hmm, does it really matter if I choose my race if the top of the form says "Duoying Li"?</p>
<p>
[quote]
Hmm, does it really matter if I choose my race if the top of the form says "Duoying Li"?
[/quote]
</p>
<p>As tokenadult stated, colleges are discouraged from guessing.</p>
<p>If your surname really is Li, then you could always change it to Lee. Within Asia, Lee could be from Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, and a few others. More importantly, Lee is not even guaranteed to be Asian (e.g. Robert E. Lee).</p>
<p>Did Mr. Li marry someone of a different "race"? Did the Li family bring up adoptive children? Was Mr. Li himself the child of an interracial marriage? That's why colleges don't guess, and report quite a large number of students as "race unknown." </p>
<p>Colleges are told by the federal government that they must ask students, but students are not required to give an answer to a question about ethnicity or race. In turn, colleges are not to guess in the absence of information from the student.</p>
<p>What does it say about us and our country that this thread has #765 posts? Nothing good....</p>
<p>I've actually enjoyed most of the discussion here, and this thread only has hundreds of posts because it is a thread merged together from something like a dozen separate threads. If the statement is that you, hpg90, hope that people will get along with their neighbors without classifying them into phony "racial" categories, I couldn't agree more. But we got into this mess in the first place because slave-owners and segregationists did classify people that way.</p>
<p>And perhaps because we have one of the highest rates of racial mixing also due to immigration since slavery. Picking a country at random, Norway doesn't have as much racial mixing, so perhaps it's less of a topic for discussion there.</p>