True, especially the part about “embellishing” – everyone and their cousins do it. But I personally draw the line at lying about race to abuse a policy set up to help those disadvantaged by systemic hurdles not faced by other races.
Your kids are “Hispanic”. As I have said elsewhere, white Hispanic is the loophole in the URM policy. Personally I would have preferred the policy to be based on income rather than race, but hey, they don’t listen to me. Whether or not you and your D takes advantage of that loophole is up to you. Not that you care, but I don’t see it as cheating either way. I have a friend whose D is 25% black but looks 100% blond and white. My friend decided, long ago, that her D is not checking that URM box.
Its been a mixed bag for us today, my daughter got WL from NorthWestern yesterday and BU today. She is not too upset, she has some good choices and has decided not to accept the WL. On the bright side, we just got word from JOFSR that her second research paper was accepted for publishing!
Really attractive campus with nice mix of old and new.
Diverse social scene (everything from frat parties to home-grown music scene.)
Walkable and affordable off-campus options (once pandemic restrictions are lifted.)
Cons:
Wesleyan is one of the most visible collegiate outposts of the American culture wars (almost any campus controversy is guaranteed to go viral.)
Wesleyan students can take “critical thinking” too literally; there’s a kind of reflex reaction to reveal the negative side to everything (think Ted Mosby on HIMYM.)
Popular teachers and courses tend to be larger than the teacher/studio ratio might predict (President Roth’s “Emergence of The Modern” regularly tops 100 students.)
White Hispanic is not a “loophole”. I’m assuming best intentions here, so let me just bring awareness to one example being that even people born in México have also been identified as “white”.
This is disgusting. But maybe she really is native american even though she’s never mentioned it? Although lying about being discriminated is disgusting even if she is x% native american, and especially if she looks white.
I grew up in Middletown and my mother worked at Wesleyan. Could have gone for free, but had been turned off by the school at a young age (back in the 80s it seemed very counter culture). But mostly I wanted to get the heck out of that part of the world. However over the years so many great people have come out of Wesleyan and thought we would have my D take a look. She too was like I CANNOT go to school in Middletown. So the Apple didn’t fall far from the tree. But a cousin goes there now and plays soccer and loves the small town CT feel.
I think “the idea” is to boost the diversity of perspectives, and also to help ensure that Hispanics are well-represented at all levels of society. I’m sure it’s eye-opening for a lot of kids to learn how widely the term “Hispanic” applies. That’s a good thing!
She is caucasian. And ironically, her family is racist (I teach at a nearby university; one of the siblings goes there but opted to live at home since the student population is too ‘ethnic’ for their taste. Classy). If she is a small percentage Native American it must be a recent discovery, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the parents found a way to get some sort of documentation. They tend to game things in general. But yeah, it’s depressing when honest kids are possibly disadvantaged by people like this.
How annoying. My kid wouldn’t even check the Native American box and she’s the member of a federally recognized tribe. She felt it was disingenuous both because her skin is so white it glows and because we’re not involved in tribal life. I don’t think many schools ask to see the certificate. This kid is likely to get away with it.
@NateandAllisMom You guys may love UCSD if you’re not hung up on traditional classical buildings (eg UW, Harvard, UCLA). We are at UCSD right now. The construction stuff I saw last July is gone. Apparently, it’s moving in day today? For what, i don’t know I see parents moving their kids in.
We got the Sixth campus and my jaws dropped. Where are the forklifts, fences, etc? It’s amazing. I’m a traditional architecture type gal but I think I wanna go here!!
Not sure. What should’ve taken 8 hours took 12 hours to get here! We still have to swing back up to Irvine (staying there). These kids all look happy to be back, TBH.
We were just talking about this recently as well. My grandfather came here from Mexico. He hated Mexico. All of my father’s first cousins though are from Mexico. Someone once suggested we could consider ourselves partially hispanic and should mark it on the college apps. I was like, give me a break, no way, no how. My kids are not at all hispanic nor associate with it just because their grandfather was there for awhile and they have tons of mexican relatives. Not taking advantage of the system like that.
That said, the other thing that is sort of screwed up is First Generation IMO. My oldest kid did not go to college. He comes from a highly educated family. His parents are both remarried to attorneys, one parent has an MA and the other is an MD. Yet, if he were to happen to marry someone like him, (who happens to be a savant when it comes to computers and self taught in the field as well as able to get a 6 figure job at the age of 18)and has kids, those kids would be considered First Generation. That is f’d up. That is not what first generation is really meant to be. So how many kids are taking advantage of that too? There clearly needs to be an overhaul in some fashion of this whole process.
Some minorities are starting to not even mark the box because they feel they are over-represented and can’t get into schools. It would really be interested if admissions were completely blind. No knowledge of sex, race, income, etc. to see how things shook out. Probably not so good for many of us, lol!
Sickening really. I think I recently read some report about how many kids at UT have lied about being some sort of minority or something like that to gain admission. At some point schools are going to start auditing and it won’t be a pretty site. This is pure fraud and one day some kid is going to file a major lawsuit or a group is going to file a class action lawsuit against a university and they will be screwed. If someone goes all the way back to school records when enrolling a kid in Kindergarten, can you imagine how many families checked the box white non hispanic, or caucasian but now for college are suddenly hispanic or some other race?
Not so sure about that because I know First Generations that have gotten into colleges and the colleges had no idea whether they were low income or not at the time they were accepted. Financial aid apps aren’t due before decisions come out in all cases so it is easy to avoid that. We had also asked this in some cases as it relates to my son and were told the same thing since it made no sense whatsoever.