<p>Every year, thousands of high school students spend months focused on the art of self presentation. They cram for standardized tests, pen soul-baring essays, and join clubs to beef up their resum</p>
<p>awesommeeeeeee. more affirmative action =] thanks for posting</p>
<p>Since there doesn’t seem to be a dearth of gay students at schools like UPenn, I imagine that this is more to equip them to market themselves,sell themselves to likely admitted students – not as an indicator in which to pick gay applicants.</p>
<p>But I imagine this will be a heated debate – even in the wording of the question</p>
<p>This thread is probably gonna get ugly real fast. </p>
<p>But darn, I wish this was in place earlier.</p>
<p>This is just weird, IMO. </p>
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<p>My school’s GSA is probably 3/4 straight kids.</p>
<p>Why does it really matter what’s someone’s sexual orientation? Why does a school need to know? Are gays smarter or stupider than the general public? Are they worst/better citizens? Do they have a certain disability that a school needs to be aware of? What is the purpose of the check box? Should a gay student be afraid of discrimination therefore not check off the box? If so, would a gay student by not checking off the box be lying?</p>
<p>oldfort: in an ideal world, it would be certainly self-reporting, with the aim for colleges to then direct gay-friendly services towards potential applicants.</p>
<p>Are they trying to increase the diversity of their class?</p>
<p>Yeah, this is kind of silly. First of all, those schools tend to (perhaps not always) have a high percentage of LGBT students anyway. The best way to attract a subset of the population is to make the school appealing to said subset, not to require more check boxes.</p>
<p>If it indeed turns out to be affirmative action for gays, it will only be a year before everyone starts marking themselves as gay. There’s no way for it to be proven and therefore no fear in marking gay if you’re not.</p>
<p>If this really becomes another form AA, there will be a LOT of people coming out of the closet come junior/senior year :P</p>
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<p>T26E4 is correct. Penn is not stating that it will give an admissions edge to gay students. Rather, it is having gay student groups reach out to already admitted students who have indicated that gay issues are an important consideration in their decisions about where to attend school.</p>
<p>Here’s a link to the USA Today article (which has a title that can easily lead to confusion about the initiative) in which Dean Furda characterizes the initiative as similar to what Penn does for many other admitted students–<br>
[At</a> Penn, gay students help recruit gay applicants - USATODAY.com](<a href=“http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2010-02-26-IHE-Penn-recruiting-gay-students25_ST_N.htm]At”>http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2010-02-26-IHE-Penn-recruiting-gay-students25_ST_N.htm)</p>
<p>^Yeah, that’s what’s weird about this. And we just learned in Psych that most people aren’t 100% sure of their sexuality until around 20. Of course, I know plenty of gays who are fully confident in their sexuality, but it’s still a strange thing to report to colleges since it’s not as verifiable as, say, race.</p>
<p>It seems like such a personal question. Kind of like asking whether you are a virgin or not. But I was raised in a different era, so maybe that is why I feel this way.</p>
<p>I agree. Especialily because being gay is so hard to “prove” or “disprove”–like race or gender or age discrimination–I see people stepping out of the closet to try to better their chances, even if they really are straight.</p>
<p>And what about someone who’s “in the middle”? Wouldn’t this new policy tip them towards being gay to up their chances?</p>
<p>I believe this in an LGBT policy. Those in the middle would be welcome to choose from the latter end of the acronym.</p>
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<p>bwm: your assumption is that colleges would be so dumb as to be susceptible to kids who would fake their “gayness” to gain an advantage. As I stated, it seems like it’d be only used for marketing outreach for potential students --not another “affirmative action” sub-group.</p>
<p>If my kid were gay, I would tell him/her not to check off the box. There is no affirmative action where a school needs to have X% of gay people. For top tier schools they could fill their class 20 times over with number of applicants they have, why would they care to market to gay people? On the flip side, if there are too many gay applicants (like too many Asians) it may even work against you.</p>
<p>If it’s outreach, why is it on the application? Shouldn’t these opportunities only be made available to accepted students?</p>
<p>maybe they use the information AFTER they’ve selected the students?</p>
<p>Still though, I am against the box. If the admissions officers are blind to students’ sexual orientation and just choose randomly, the laws of probability and statistics or whatever say that they are still bound to come up with a significant gay population. the only reaosn they’d add a box is to make the proportion of gay students larger.</p>