@MYOS1634 - The college won’t tell him he’s not Hispanic because he doesn’t speak Spanish. They won’t know or ask and it wouldn’t matter. I’m Hispanic (both of my parents are 100% Hispanic and therefore so am I) and I don’t speak Spanish. I didn’t grow up in a home where Spanish was spoken, we all spoke English. My kids are 1/2 Hispanic and the only Spanish they know is what they learned in high school. Since my kids were born, I’ve been checking the Hispanic box for ethnicity on forms (when asked if they were Hispanic), because it is accurate and they are of Hispanic ethnicity, and checking white for race. When only race is asked (not ethnicity), we always check the white box.
To answer your question about the dad, yes, the dad is Hispanic. The boy (son) is also of Hispanic ethnicity and would be eligible for the National Hispanic Recognition Program, etc, if he checks the Hispanic box (which he is 100% entitled to do). Once he checks that box on college forms, he will probably be invited to cultural events. My kids weren’t interested and just ignored the invites.
@OHMomof2 Wherw exactly did you get your information? Being Asian in college admissions only can hurt you.
It is so racist to believe that minorities can’t do anything by themselves. I believe in socioeconomic affirmative action but not racial affirmative action. We should spend more effort and money in building better schools for low income neighborhoods rather than accepting lessqualified people simply becauss they were lucky to be born a certain race.
Anyone making the argument of “diversity” needs to stop. Caltech doesn’t consider race at all, and it is 40% Asian 40% white. They still have diversity. True diversity can’t be forced by a quota.
In the NBA do they set quotas? No!
What if the NBA one day said, “hey we need more diversity on our team. Let’s accept more Asian applicants even if they are less qualified than our African american team members.”
Or what if the NBA decided “because 10% of the population is Asian, we need a quota. Every tram must have 10% reserved to Asians”
isn’t that a great idea? That’s basically what affirmative action says.
Every kid on the news accepted to all 8 ivy leagues is African american, even though some of their SAT scores and ECs are lower than average and unimpressive.
I also am against gender affirmative action. Every feminist can shoot me because gender affirmative action is ridiculous. Why do we need more female engineers if they’re less qualified than males in the major? (I’m a girl BTW no hate) I would feel like a loser if I got hired for a job not because I was qualified, but because I’m female.
I have personal experience. My sister had a 2400 SAT (first try), 5 SAT II (750-800), over 10 APs (all 5s).
She also had great ECs. She was in marchingband (4 years) and became a section leader. She played the clarinet since she was 9 and participated in high school top wind ensemble. She also did outside bands and many competitions. She volunteered at a science center for over 300 hrs. She was the secretary and a founder of a music club at her school.
I honestly thought she was qualified for the best, but when she got her rejection letters, she was absolutely heartbroken. I just don’t understand how people can justify giving her spot to a less qualified minority.
You can call me all sorts of names: racist, menimist, brat
But the facts remain that colleges and even employment can’t use race as a determining factor because that’s just reverse discrimination.
Education and pro teams aren’t the same thing at all. Public universities have a public mandate for the common good - and try to encompass the population, excluding no one. (That’s what we did in the past, though.) Pro teams don’t have any “common good” mandate and aren’t public institutions. They can pick whoever they need most or find best.
In addition, private universites that do not have a public mandate do believe that they have a mandate for the common good (it’s a fundamental part of what the American “ethos” is made of, part of who we are as a country, to believe that personal aspiration and ambition and drive, through education and hard work, will be good not only for individuals, but also for the country as a whole, and should be encouraged and supported.) These institutions will also look to fill institutional needs. Filling an institutional need is part of your chances and no one can know ahead of time.
One of your assumptions is false, BTW - that those accepted under Affirmative Action are less qualified. A study conducted at top schools shows that once students from lower-performing schools have had time to catch up with peers from higher performing schools, there’s no difference. In addition, one reason why top schools (top 25 universities/LACs) de-emphasize standardized testing to a certain extent is that scores are not predictive, and the highest correlation is to parents’ income. Measuring how much higher than the school’s average or the predicted score for that income range an individual’s score is gives more information than the score on its own.
I’m sorry for what happened to your sister. However, anyone applying to “reach for everyone” colleges should know that “everyone” includes them. If acceptance rates are below 20%, it means almost all applicants are qualified (margianlly qualified applicants may exist but they’re a very small group). Therefore, most qualified applicants are turned away, even exceptional ones.
Note that marching band section leader only counts as, perhaps a 4 on the 1-9 ratings for ECs.
I understand why your sister was heartbroken and I hope she’d designed a good list with 2 safeties she liked, a handful of good matches she would feel happy to attend, and then added reach and dream schools hoping but not counting on them, or that she decided to take a gap year if none of her choices worked out for her.
Some States do not use race as a factor: Texas, California.
It hasn’t stopped people from complaining.
I find it hilarious people really still think that the reasons that top schools are using Affirmative Action is to compensate for past/current discrimination. I don’t think Harvard or Yale care at all whether or not they play their “moral role” (if aff action policies really are moral) in society.
While the admission officers who they send to visit your school seem to be nice, poised, and don’t look like they have a hidden agenda, there are 10-15 genius backend analysts at every school (who have signed countless NDA’s) to make sure that the University’s admission policies are strategically improving the prestige of the University.
The REAL reason that these schools are using Aff Action is to attract as many applicants as possible. The UC system and UT system saw substantial decline in enrolled African American and Latino students after they stopped Aff Action. If the ivy’s started to do this, substantially less African American/Latino students would think they had the chance of getting admitted, and wouldn’t bother to apply- less applications means a higher acceptance rate for the ivies, and thus less prestige/lower USNWR ranking. This is also the primary reason why colleges geographically discriminate- if they let it be known they are taking students from all 50 states, students from all 50 states will apply.
So if you are going around saying that due to discrimination in America, affirmative action should be there- whether or not you are actually correct- all you are doing is helping sell the admission strategies of ivy league schools.
Top 10 schools must love Asians. They’re the reason why these schools get to crow about how many 2400/4.0/Valedictorians they are “forced” to turn away each year. The frenzy around these schools seems to have coincided with the spike in Asian immigration the last 2 decades. I don’t recall seeing such frenzy 2 decades ago. As recently as 1995 Penn’s acceptance rate was 47%. Harvard’s acceptance rate in the 80s was in the 30s or 40s. Even better, the more these schools turn away their Asian applicants, the more they seem to worship at their altars, doing all they can to keep these schools ever more “elusive”. With the rate at which Asians are immigrating to the US, especially from China, India and South Korea, in another decade the acceptance rate of these schools will be down to less than 1%, maybe even sooner.
@puzzled123 I actually agree with most of what you’re saying. But just wondering, why does UCLA have such a huge number of applicants while they themselves don’t do affirmative action?
I still think they should base affirmative action on income/background rather than on race. I understand that the colleges want diversity, but I don’t think it necessarily has to be a diversity based that much on race. Maybe it should be more focused on a diversity of background (past hardships/circumstances etc.) /income/interests etc. more so than race.
Overall, it is because ivy league schools are more easily substituted. If you are a California applicant, the only other school that is comparable in quality and price is Berkeley. For ivies, they are competing against other ivies as well as Stanford/MIT/Chicago/Caltech/Duke/Other good privates. This is why if they stopped Aff Action, they would be disproportionately affected in number of applicants (just look at Caltech’s relatively low USNWR ranking despite the high avg. SAT of admitted students).
I also agree with your point regarding socioeconomic consideration in application evaluation. I, however, find Aff Action to be very hypocritical. If the purpose is to help those that have been previously discriminated, why are asians getting discriminated against in the aff action process? By aff action logic, shouldn’t they be helped? What was Japanese internment? Just look at all the horrible ways asians were discriminated in the past:
And they continue to be discriminated against with aff action policies…
I think this contradictory nature just highlights my earlier point: universities aren’t using aff action to help groups that have been discriminated against. They don’t care about that at all. They are using it to attract more applicants and lower their acceptance rate.
@dancelance@rdeng2614
Well it is true that minorities statistically have lower incomes. I believe in socioeconomic affirmativr action. You can’t simply assume someone has been through hardships just because they are minorities. “Diversity” is just an excuse given many times to the bright, deserving students who sued Harvard because of racist admission.
Im white applying for some UC schools (bio-med programs) will checking the race box hurt my chances in comparison to leaving it blank I also have an extremely common identifying name and use a separate email for college stuff (to keep it organized) so im not going to be traced back to any social media if someone is curious
@Brandi5120 yes check it. Don’t worry, UC schools don’t use affirmative action at all so it won’t hurt your chances. Neither does Caltech and a couple of other good schools
@MYOS1634, you make some valid points. I attend a public school in an affluent suburb and consider myself extremely “lucky” to be accepted by U Chicago and two of the Ivies (despite perfect GPA, near perfect SAT scores, and excellent ECs). There are two students from my school (who are not white or Asian) that come from privileged backgrounds (parents who are doctors and lawyers) who were accepted by highly selective schools (Northwestern, Wash U, Duke, and Cornell) despite fairly low GPAs, SAT scores, and unremarkable ECs. From my observations, their GPAs we’re not very high due to missing assignments and lack of preparation for tests and quizzes. In my opinion, they are both very smart. How do colleges justify the selection of these particular students over others? It is definitely unfair! There is a bright side to this story, one of them has chosen to attend Cornell! Ha, ha he will finally have to work hard now and realize his full potential! There is remarkable serendipity in all of this.
Seeing Asian kids complain about AA gets me heated. Asians make up 5% of the country compared to blacks who make up 18% of the country. Despite this, Asians make up 24% of the ivy league and blacks make up 6%. Who is really “taking your spot”?
Asians need to score 280 points higher than blacks on the SAT to get into the exact same colleges… and people get heated when Asians complain about this?? This is just like the people who got heated at MLK or Gandhi for speaking out against injustices!
@0br0123 Maybe no one is taking anyone’s spot? Also your stat on AA population percentage is wrong, so I’m skeptical about the rest. I’m black and I get mad when people bitch about affirmative action, but I don’t think Asians are stealing spots at all.