<p>I will say, knowing that MIT admission officers look on in this forum, that the federal law on the subject has it right. Applicants get to decide whether or not they answer the question at all. They can decline to answer either or both questions (“ethnicity” or “race”) by law. Therefore no college admission committee should make any adverse inference of ANY kind about a college applicant who chooses to exercise what is, after all, a legal right for all college applicants without exception. A college that systematically disfavors applicants who decline to answer the OPTIONAL questions on a college application is practicing racial discrimination, period. There are a lot of reasons why applicants decline to self-identify with any narrower group of humankind than humankind as a whole (in my family’s case, it is because of deep knowledge of human biology, including knowledge gained from a book recently published by MIT Press), and no college has any basis in law for assuming the worst about applicants who think that their most fitting self-identification is declining to check any of the checkboxes on the form. I want to put that out there, loud and clear (I’m a lawyer), because the MIT admission office statement from last year is subject to the interpretation (which may not be the intended meaning of the MIT admission office) that applicants who exercise their legal right to leave the checkboxes blank are disfavored by the MIT admission committee. If that is so, the federal Department of Education should look into the issue, as the law is completely clear that applicants are at liberty to answer the questions or not as they choose.</p>