Family friend that is half white- half Asian checked “multi racial”. Is that an option on the application? ( family friend applied 5 years ago)
Statistics suggest an asian admissions ceiling at Ivy League schools. Highlights from Epenshade paper & Ron Unz paper:
http://www.quora.com/Is-it-harder-for-an-Asian-student-to-be-offered-admission-at-a-highly-selective-university-or-college-in-the-US
The Epenshade paper:
https://www.princeton.edu/~tje/files/webOpportunity%20Cost%20of%20Admission%20Preferences%20Espenshade%20Chung%20June%202005.pdf
Here is the Unz paper:
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-myth-of-american-meritocracy/
Also read “The Gatekeepers”
http://www.amazon.com/The-Gatekeepers-Admissions-Process-Premier/dp/0142003085
Even the posters on CC consistently express the same bias toward asian applicants: their EC’s are “inauthentic”; they’re just robots; they have high scores only because they do test prep; they add nothing to the richness of the college experience, yada, yada…
While it’s clearly neutral to identify as white, there is potential peril in also ticking the asian box. Tick it at your own risk.
Op,
We live in LA and dks are 1/2 Asian and 1/2 Caucasian. First if all, there are a ton of 1/2 Asian and 1/2 Caucasian kiddos here. Maybe 5-15% of my dks HS classes.
I recommended that my kiddos leave the ethnicity box unchecked especially if the last name is Caucasian. The race info is required to be put on it by the fed govt for stats collecting purposes. But kiddo should not feel compelled to answer it. Should kiddo not be able to resist, then pick multiracial but don’t put down what races.
Also, I never realized this before, but our elite private HS sends about 5-10% of the class to H and 5-10% to S each yr and maybe only 0-1% of the class are Asian to the combined H and S. And at our HS, the Asians are writers, history buffs, and stem.
My half Asian/half White nieces and nephew check the White box so that they don’t get any possible issues with any school that might “hold them to a higher standard”. They’re free to do that. It’s their choice.
They’re in Calif, and therefore also applied to Calif publics which aren’t supposed to use race. However, at some point there is the human element making the decisions as to who gets accepted, so there is some wiggle room for race to come into play.
@YoHoYoHo Can you elaborate on the “only 0-1% of the class are Asian to the combined H and S.” Do you mean only 0-1% of the admits to H and S are Asian? Are the vast majority of the 5-10% of the H and S admits Caucasian?
if she was a applying to an ivy league school or other highly competitive schools, they will use that to discriminate against her.
I would say at a majority of other schools they will not use that to hurt or help her chance to get admission. if you want warm weather look at some of the schools in Florida too!
p.s. "My daughter is applying to several highly selective schools in SoCal so any edge she can get she’ll need. "
shifting between white or asian or marking both will not help her. their is zero advantage to being white in admissions and has a slightly negative weight against you, and being asian is a very heavy weight against you. I hope the Asian discrimination case forces the ivies to expose their discrimination game.I also wish more people especially Asian students from competitive families realized that the united states has so many awesome schools and you are not a failure if you do not attend a school that is at the top of an opinion based list. a lot of stress and heartache could be avoided just bypassing the rat race for “top” schools and when your child graduates from any other of the 1000x of schools they will have learned no less, be just as ready for the next stage in their life and they will have made amazing friends too.
As you can see, there are many views about this, mostly based (in my opinion) on pretty weak information, on all sides. So, I guess I’d say, if in doubt, why not tell the truth? At least that way, you maintain your own integrity.
Or when in doubt, just leave it blank, and let the colleges judge your child on the strength of his/her qualifications, rather than on the color of the skin.
Does anybody think that a college that wants to discriminate against applicants on the basis of race will be prevented from doing so by leaving the question blank? I can see leaving it blank on principle, but I don’t think it’s going to fool anybody.
Leave it blank on principle
@Hunt Probably most of all half-Asian kids have a non-Asian last name. So how would a college know that they were part Asian unless they check the Asian box?
Sigh. The tortuous agony of identity politics.
D left the box blank on principle. That being said, she is the only person in the US with her name so it would take less than 30 seconds online to come up with a picture of her. She knew that but wanted to make her little statement.
The common app has a place to select two races. My son is primarily European and Asian, so he selected each of them (we don’t have an Asian name, he does not have an Asian first name either). He did not select his third race (African) because he is a smaller percentage African than European and Asian.
There should not be any discussion if she can list two races on the Common App. Often we have to list “Other” when there is no way to put two or more races. For doctor’s offices, recently it has changed in our state, and they want all races (because of certain diseases associated with certain backgrounds), so my son selects “white, Asian, African”.
I believe that Asians are not discriminated against wholesale in college acceptances, but I do believe more study as relates to ECs and well-roundedness would really settle the issue.
Note that for medical purposes, genetic origins as they relate to specific medical situations can be much more finely grained than socially defined racial groups.
Well, if I really wanted to discriminate against Asians, I would simply Google anybody who didn’t check the box. For 95% of them, especially if you are talking about people with the kind of credentials for a top college, I’ll find lots of info online, including a picture.
Or–again, if I really wanted to discriminate–I would assume that anybody who didn’t check the box at all was probably an Asian.
It’s also possible that even if colleges want to discriminate against Asians, they don’t care much about discriminating against half-Asian people with non-Asian names. So maybe they wouldn’t bother.
It is rather likely that, if race or ethnicity matters, declining to state will be treated as whatever the least favorable race or ethnicity is for the situation.
I assume people who decline to check the box for principled reasons are willing to accept the risk that it will have negative consequences. But if you are declining to check the box for strategic reasons, I think @ucbalumnus makes a good point that it might backfire.
If a college is going to discriminate against your children based on their ethnicity, why would you want them to go there?
Classic case of darn if you do and darn if you don’t. Unfortunate you have to play these race games.