<p>So, if you leave ethnicity blank, are you just assumed to be a non-URM? At MIT and also other schools, do adcoms try to figure out your race from your name, parents' country of origin, and other biographical info?</p>
<p>…Just be honest on your application. Try to get in on your own merits. If you want to leave the ethnicity blank, that is fine, and you are more than welcome to do so. But don’t ask about the potential benefits of lying on your application (Yeah I know, I know, it’s not lying. But it is manipulating the truth).</p>
<p>Just put down your ethnicity unless you don’t know what it is.</p>
<p>Well if your name is John Chan, chances are you aren’t fooling anyone.</p>
<p>^ roflqtm.</p>
<p>What if my name were Robert Lee?</p>
<p>And my family descended from a Confederate General’s family ('s slaves)?</p>
<p>
They don’t assume anything. They don’t try to figure out anything. They really don’t care. They only care when they are able to list a student until a particular ethnicity when doing data for racial breakdowns. If you leave the race part blank you’re going to end up in the “unreported” category. It doesn’t matter if your name is Xu Chang or Pablo Gutierrez; they can’t “assume” you belong to a racial category and list you as such, however likely it may be, if it’s unconfirmed. And hence there is no admissions effect by not listing your ethnicity, and no, a college isn’t going to FROWN upon you for doing so either.</p>
<p>I love newest newb</p>
<p>But dude abandoning your country and throwing away your identity just for a possible edge in admission is low. I didn’t so that cause of PRIDE</p>
<p>There are a few URMs who do not list ethnicity, but not very many.</p>
<p>If you are white or Asian, I don’t see how choosing not to list your ethnicity can possibly help you. If the school has a secret quota limiting the number of Asians, it will be easy enough for them to figure out if you are one. If they don’t have such a secret quota, choosing not to list also won’t help you.</p>
<p>In other words, choosing not to list your ethnicity is pointless if you’re trying to game the system to your advantage. It really only has a point if your ethnicity would help you and you choose not to use that advantage.</p>
<p>OP, just put down what you really are. I doubt it’ll work anyway unless you have a name like Juan Pablo Sanchez-Ordonez or Laquisha Bonifa Johnson-Robinson but are magically a white person.</p>
<p>And yes, we are all too familiar with the Chinese and their PRIDE.</p>
<p>Ray</p>
<p>There is a very good chance that “Juan Pablo Sanchez-Ordonez” is a white person. “Hispanic” is not a race. :)</p>
<p>Fine, a third of all “Hispanics” are technically white, but in the minds of laymen (and for the purposes of admissions offices), white people and Hispanic people are not the same thing.</p>
<p>From Wikipedia</p>
<p>As of 2008, about 47 million or 15.4% of Americans were ethnically Hispanic or Latino. Of those, about 29 million or 62% were White.</p>
<p>I know what you are getting at though. For admissions purposes this group is treated differently than whites of European descent. This, I will agree, is true.</p>
<p>Meh, I doubt that those “european-hispanics” are treated as whites for admissions purposes for two reasons:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Colleges can still throw them into that % hispanic statistic. So, for political purposes, a Spaniard is just as valuable to them as a Mexican.</p></li>
<li><p>I have a couple friends who are from Spain who would probably tell you that they wouldn’t have gotten into their ivy league schools without their race. Plus, I remember getting a feeling like ALL hispanics benefited from AA on the results threads.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>For the most part, you can’t hide from your race, especially with the Alumni interview and the (optional) photograph. One notable exception is for those applicants whose mother is Asian and father is white. In this situation, the applicant has a distinct advantage over the 100% Asian applicant and half-Asian/half-white applicant whose father is Asian.</p>
<p>^^I know there is a whole different thread related to this topic, but I thought that if you were from Spain you were NOT considered Hispanic. You would be considered “European” and not Hispanic.</p>
<p>If you’re literally from Spain, you might not be counted as Hispanic, but if you grew up in the United States and are of Spanish heritage, I think you get the URM boost because it’s not always obvious that your ancestors were all from Spain and not some other Spanish-speaking nation.</p>
<p>@james: Um… I see you’re saying that whites have it easier in admissions than Asians, but I fail to see how the kid with an Asian mom and a white dad has an advantage over the kid with an Asian dad and a white mom. Yes, the one with a white father can masquerade as white, but the one with an Asian father, if he says that he’s half-white/half-Asian, will be treated as a mixed kid (who aren’t treated any worse than white kids).</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/harvard-university/990169-leaving-ethnicity-section-blank.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/harvard-university/990169-leaving-ethnicity-section-blank.html</a></p>
<p>Saints2009 also asked this question on the Harvard page. </p>
<p>I don’t think you can make a correlation between leaving the ethnicity question blank and being rejected or admitted. My daughter left the ethnicity section blank, and was admitted to Harvard. (Declining the interview, when one is offered though, may raise a red flag.)</p>
<p>Posts #1, 4, 5, 6, and 11</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/927219-race-college-admission-faq-discussion-8-a.html?highlight=FAQ[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/927219-race-college-admission-faq-discussion-8-a.html?highlight=FAQ</a></p>