"Race" in College Admission FAQ & Discussion 6

[Sapper1815]

<p>Canadian universities don’t ask for race/ethnicity data, and aren’t required to. The stats for McGill appear to refer to 82% Canadian, 18% foreign students.</p>

[tokenadult]

<p>

The stats for McGill appear to refer to 82% Canadian, 18% foreign students.

</p>

<p>That’s a very plausible interpretation of how McGill filled out the Common Data Set questionnaire. Thanks.</p>

[fabrizio]

<p>^^</p>

<p>Very interesting. Thanks!</p>

[limabeans]

<p>What if someone lists themselves as a member of a particular race, yet this is completely false? I know someone who listed themselves as Mexican, but their only connection “as a Mexican” is only because the family lived in Mexico for 3 months as an ex-pat. The student now attends Princeton.</p>

[tokenadult]

<p>

What if someone lists themselves as a member of a particular race, yet this is completely false?

</p>

<p>Well, that would be lying, and lying on a college application can be a ground for </p>

<p>a) not being admitted in the first place, </p>

<p>b) having admission revoked after enrollment, </p>

<p>or even </p>

<p>c) having a degree nullified after a student graduates. </p>

<p>But how seriously a college would view the issue depends on the overall context of the application. It’s possible the student correctly expressed the facts and that the admission committee admitted the student on another basis anyway. </p>

<p>(How would you have any access to another student’s application file? I have some very close friends, but my very best friends, and my son’s very best friends, haven’t seen any complete application files from anyone in my family.)</p>

[adefto]

<p>I’m of Burmese descent. Although I’m considered Asian, there are not many of us around. So do you guys think this would count as a minority?</p>

[limabeans]

<p>That’s true, I don’t have access to someone else’s file. But, the mom admitted to friends (not to me personally), and her son admitted to my son that the information was false.</p>

<p>From how both my friend and my son expressed this issue to me, it seemed as if the family knew they lied and admitted that’s how the son got in. Sadly, my son, now a freshman, kept wanted to lie too. He felt that was the “only” way he’d get in.</p>

<p>Should i do anything, or not bother? The student is now a sophomore.</p>

[StitchInTime]

<p>National Public Radio: [url=<a href=“http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120209980]Mixed”>Mixed Race Americans Picture A 'Blended Nation' : NPR]Mixed</a> Race Americans Picture A ‘Blended Nation’<a href=“includes%20audio”>/url</a>:</p>

<p>

The 2000 U.S. census was the first to give Americans the option to check more than one box for race. Nearly 7 million people declared themselves to be multiracial that year, a number that’s expected to shoot up in the 2010 count. As more of the nation’s population identifies itself as being of mixed race, the authors of a new book say Americans’ traditional ideas of racial identity are in for a challenge.</p>

<p>In the book Blended Nation, photographer Mike Tauber and producer Pamela Singh combine portraits of mixed-race Americans with stories of living beyond the sometimes rigid notions of race. The husband-and-wife team tell host Liane Hansen they wanted to highlight the personal experiences of life between categories.</p>

<p>“We really wanted to know what it was like for somebody who checks more than one box to exist in that realm,” Tauber says.</p>

<p>Though Singh says she considers race to be a social construct instead of a biological one, she points out that notions of racial identity have concrete applications.</p>

<p>“The concept of race and ethnicity and ancestry are so highly muddled,” says Singh. “Yet so many of our educational, social, business and governmental policies are based on fixed racial categories.”</p>

<p>According to U.S. Census estimates, multiracial Americans have become one of the country’s fastest growing demographic groups. Nicholas Jones, chief of the U.S. Census Bureau’s Racial Statistics Branch, says the number of mixed-race individuals has increased about 25 percent since the 2000 census. “These are mainly driven by births of children from interracial parent couples,” he says.</p>

<p>Researchers say that as the number of interracial marriages increases, so does the level of social acceptance and awareness about multiracialism.</p>

<p>It’s the culmination of a trend that started centuries ago, says Alan Goodman, professor of biological anthropology and dean of faculty at Hampshire College in Massachusetts. "There were certain barriers to having individuals of different ethnic groups and cultures coming together. The first one was barriers of space. But in 1492, those barriers began to fall. Then, there were barriers of law in the United States, and those finally fell in the 1960s…

</p>

[tokenadult]

<p>

I’m of Burmese descent. Although I’m considered Asian, there are not many of us around. So do you guys think this would count as a minority?

</p>

<p>Yes, there is no doubt that a person from Burma would be classified as “Asian,” but also little doubt that Burmese applicants are less commonplace than, say, Chinese or Indian applicants. So it’s worth mentioning that your background is Burmese. It is impossible to say how much that will influence your chances of admission, because colleges are not at all definite about such issues. Apply widely and see what happens. Good luck with your applications.</p>

[speedo]

<p>Post #7 </p>

<p>Private colleges have wide legal latitude in assembling the class of their choice. Under current Federal Law colleges both private and public can consider race as a factor in admissions decisions. Despite numerous allegations here on CC and in the media, few, if any
private colleges have been found guilty of racial discrimination in admissions decisions.</p>

[siserune]

<p>

@tokenadult

Colleges Really, Truly Aren’t Expected to Guess Student Ethnicity

</p>

<p>That appears to be yet another repost of wrong material that several posters have corrected the last few times it appeared. </p>

<p>The (presumably correct) statement that colleges are not required to determine each student’s race/ethnic classification does not support your (likely wrong) claims that colleges “don’t care” or won’t ever “bother” to determine or attribute omitted race/ethnic information or “are discouraged” from doing so. Those claims appear to be your personal hopes and speculation, ad-libbing on behalf of Federal authorities and college admissions offices.</p>

<p>As was posted earlier, some of the Common Data Sets for Princeton University have listed 0.00 as the percentage of “race unknown” students. This is, apparently, an example of a school where some students who omitted race information were for some purposes and by some means assigned a category by the school. (To avoid frivolous quibbles, let me note that Princeton does not appear to have excluded those students from the CDS reporting, and that had it done so, that would itself have been a form of institutional refusal to accept the “race unknown” category at face value).</p>

<p>

A lot of applicants wonder if colleges will guess their ethnicity from their family name, or from their parents’ birthplaces, or from something else that appears on the application form. (Such a guess would be a wild guess, and likely to be wrong, in my own children’s case.) But it should be clear that when Harvard has been reporting to the federal government for years that about one out of every seven enrolled students at Harvard is “race unknown” that Harvard isn’t bothering to do this.

</p>

<p>That is, as you like to say, the “fallacy of equivocation”. That Harvard doesn’t bother to take strong measures (such as bothering to identify a race for each race-unknown matriculant) is being equivocated as a definitive answer to whether Harvard (or any other school) would bother to take weaker measures, such as reserving the right to treat self-identified “race unknown” applicants as being (or probably-being) from Known Race X, in cases where that inference can be made from other information and the school deems it relevant. </p>

<p>

Colleges don’t bother to guess what they don’t know. … they don’t make any particular inference about students who exercise their right not to self-report ethnicity.

</p>

<p>You don’t know any of that to be true. Colleges, like most institutions, generally reserve the right to do whatever they want within the law. What is not forbidden, is permissible, and it is entirely possible that admissions decisions are sometimes being made based on inferred-race rather than stated-race. </p>

<p>

From the Association for Institutional Research FAQ:
“there is no need to use third-party observation to supply race/ethnicity”

</p>

<p>So as far as the Assoc for Institutional Research is concerned, it is not required but perfectly OK to use third-party observation to supply race/ethnicity data (as Princeton’s department of Iinstitutional Research may have done when compiling some of their CDS), is that correct? It is not anywhere “discouraged” by the AIR, by the government, or by any other relevant entity that isn’t grinding an axe against race classification, right?</p>

[Canuckguy]

<p>

Canadian universities don’t ask for race/ethnicity data, and aren’t required to. The stats for McGill appear to refer to 82% Canadian, 18% foreign students.

</p>

<p>That sounds just about right. Among major Canadian universities, only McGill has foreign undergrads in double digits. </p>

<p>One of my fascination with this whole topic is that we do not do things like this up here. Sometimes listening to the arguments, I thought I was reading Atlas Shrugged. Anybody else?</p>

<p>

Despite numerous allegations here on CC and in the media, few, if any
private colleges have been found guilty of racial discrimination in admissions decisions.

</p>

<p>That’s because you have a situation here where one arm is investigating another. This whole thing could have been avoided by taking it to an international body for arbitration. Based on my hypothesis, we will walk on water first.</p>

<p>Based on information given, tokenadult, it seems possible to be Hispanic and Asian at the same time. Am I correct? If this is true, there may be another way out for Asians besides the Jian Li gambit.</p>

[siserune]

<p>

@Canuckguy

Despite numerous allegations here on CC and in the media, few, if any
private colleges have been found guilty of racial discrimination in admissions decisions.

That’s because you have a situation here where one arm is investigating another. This whole thing could have been avoided by taking it to an international body for arbitration.

</p>

<p>I don’t know what international bodies you think exist, that would claim jurisdiction and could possibly rule that improper discrimination is taking place, given that affirmative action systems are common and accepted worldwide. China (that is, the Chinese government), gives racial preference in the national university admissions to about 50-60 ethnic minorities, and there are familiar American-style stories each year, of Han Chinese students falsely claiming minority status so as to improve their chances. How would an international body find the allegedly Sinophobic college admissions in the USA illegal without also attacking the university admissions in China?</p>

<p>

the Jian Li gambit.

</p>

<p>The government incentive in the Jian Li case is not, as you imply, to cover things up. The actual situation is much more interesting. </p>

<p>Li’s basic claim is that if statistical models pick up a negative Asian effect, that is a stronger sign than the raw admissions rates and is prima facie evidence of discrimination that should place the burden of proof (and of investigative scrutiny) upon Princeton. This sounds good but it would be a new doctrine for the OCR, and acceptance of statistical regressions as strong evidence would destroy a huge number of complaints by blacks and Hispanics. An employer could defend a charge of discrimination by providing statistical evidence that, after adjusting for objective qualifications, hypothetical blacks are hired at comparable rates to hypothetical whites in a regression model, even if the non-hypothetical real world hiring rate for blacks is far lower than that of whites. The current Attorney General is an activist about enforcing civil rights complaints but I think the “regression defense” would be anathema to his office and possibly to his boss.</p>

<p>The incentive for the Obama administration, therefore, is to steer clear of the haziness of Espenshade’s regressions and the possibly fatal (to current discrimination law) legal battles that they would engender should there not be a clean, regression-free disposition of the Princeton investigation. There is, accordingly, a strong need to find strong * non-statistical* evidence of whether or not Princeton engaged in improper discrimination. This may explain some of the OCR’s interest in expanding the investigation: they would really, really like for the matter to be decided by direct evidence and will go pretty far to obtain it. They might even end up performing, explicitly or implicitly, the controlled study that Espenshade did not.</p>

[mommusic]

<p>It’s always interesting to see the last name “Lee” show up on lists of NMSFs, sports team members, and the like. Are they Asian or are they Lees of Virginia? No way to tell without a photo, and if one is adopted…there could still be a surprise!</p>

<p>Similarly with adoptions of children from Guatemala or China…you could have a last name that is singularly at odds with your appearance. You could be Jewish by upbringing and Asian or Hispanic by birth.</p>

<p>Not to mention that “race” is a continuum…many people are such mixtures that putting them in a category would be silly, if not impossible.</p>

<p>So I can’t imagine colleges attempting to assign a racial category to students, seen or unseen, and I wish they would stop collecting data on “race.”</p>

[tokenadult]

<p>

some of the Common Data Sets for Princeton University have listed 0.00 as the percentage of “race unknown” students.

</p>

<p>How recently? Citations, please? </p>

<p>There are still some small liberal arts colleges that report 0 percent students in the “race/ethnicity unknown” category, and there are some national research universities that report very small percentages in that category. (The selective colleges in each college grouping with high percentages of students in the “race unknown category” are shown [above[/url</a>]. Less selective colleges are shown in [url=<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1063506732-post5.html]a”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1063506732-post5.html]a</a> subsequent post](<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1063506721-post4.html]above[/url”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1063506721-post4.html), with links to the current figures from Common Data Set reporting. Because of how CC searches up titles of URLs posted to CC threads, I don’t post as long a list of colleges as the list of colleges whose current figures I have looked up.) But Princeton recently appears on the [list</a> of colleges that enroll moderately high percentages of students in the “race unknown” category](<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1063506721-post4.html]list”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1063506721-post4.html) and that seems to be the current fact about Princeton. That has been a current fact about some other Ivy plus colleges for longer. </p>

<p>It would, of course, take independent access to a college’s admission office files (obtained through a request by a neutral researcher or by a court order in a legal proceeding) to have the best evidence of exactly what a particular college does in particular cases in making inferences or not about student ethnicity from admission files. Presumably, colleges differ in their exact practices in this regard, but there are colleges that report remarkably high percentages of students as “race/ethnicity unknown,” period, when reporting to the federal government under federal regulations. </p>

<p>Here are figures from a few more colleges in the selective range of either liberal arts colleges or national research universities. </p>

<p>7 percent 1st-year at Rice University </p>

<p>[College</a> Search - Rice University - Rice - At a Glance](<a href=“College Search - BigFuture | College Board”>College Search - BigFuture | College Board) </p>

<p>7 percent 1st-year at Boston College </p>

<p>[College</a> Search - Boston College - BC - At a Glance](<a href=“College Search - BigFuture | College Board”>College Search - BigFuture | College Board) </p>

<p>7 percent 1st-year at Berkeley </p>

<p>[College</a> Search - University of California: Berkeley - At a Glance](<a href=“College Search - BigFuture | College Board”>College Search - BigFuture | College Board) </p>

<p>7 percent 1st-year at Northwestern University </p>

<p>[College</a> Search - Northwestern University - NU - At a Glance](<a href=“College Search - BigFuture | College Board”>College Search - BigFuture | College Board) </p>

<p>7 percent 1st-year, 16 percent undergrad at Claremont McKenna College </p>

<p>[College</a> Search - Claremont McKenna College - CMC - At a Glance](<a href=“College Search - BigFuture | College Board”>College Search - BigFuture | College Board) </p>

<p>[U-CAN:&lt;/a&gt; Claremont McKenna College](<a href=“ucan-network.org”>ucan-network.org) </p>

<p>7 percent 1st-year, 7 percent undergrad at Emory University </p>

<p><a href=“http://www.emory.edu/PROVOST/IPR/documents/factbookprofile/CDS_2008_2009.pdf[/url]”>http://www.emory.edu/PROVOST/IPR/documents/factbookprofile/CDS_2008_2009.pdf&lt;/a&gt; </p>

<p>6 percent 1st-year at MIT </p>

<p>[College</a> Search - Massachusetts Institute of Technology - MIT - At a Glance](<a href=“College Search - BigFuture | College Board”>College Search - BigFuture | College Board) </p>

<p>6 percent 1st-year, 5 percent undergrad at Middlebury </p>

<p><a href=“http://www.middlebury.edu/NR/rdonlyres/1DE1CC19-8DF2-4557-90DE-01B37B456F6E/0/CDS2008_2009.pdf[/url]”>http://www.middlebury.edu/NR/rdonlyres/1DE1CC19-8DF2-4557-90DE-01B37B456F6E/0/CDS2008_2009.pdf&lt;/a&gt; </p>

<p>5 percent 1st-year, 5 percent undergrad at Dartmouth </p>

<p><a href=“This Page Has Moved”>This Page Has Moved; </p>

<p>5 percent 1st-year, 5 percent undergrad at Duke </p>

<p>[College</a> Search - Duke University - Duke - At a Glance](<a href=“College Search - BigFuture | College Board”>College Search - BigFuture | College Board) </p>

<p>[U-CAN:&lt;/a&gt; Duke University](<a href=“ucan-network.org”>ucan-network.org) </p>

<p>4 percent 1st-year, 5 percent undergrad at Furman </p>

<p><a href=“http://www.furman.edu/planning/CDS/2008CDSFurman.xls[/url]”>http://www.furman.edu/planning/CDS/2008CDSFurman.xls&lt;/a&gt; </p>

<p>3 percent 1st-year at Caltech </p>

<p>[College</a> Search - California Institute of Technology - CALTECH - At a Glance](<a href=“College Search - BigFuture | College Board”>College Search - BigFuture | College Board) </p>

<p>3 percent 1st-year at Georgetown University </p>

<p>[College</a> Search - Georgetown University - At a Glance](<a href=“College Search - BigFuture | College Board”>College Search - BigFuture | College Board) </p>

<p>3 percent 1st-year, 3 percent undergrad at Bates College </p>

<p><a href=“http://www.bates.edu/Prebuilt/cds0809.pdf[/url]”>http://www.bates.edu/Prebuilt/cds0809.pdf&lt;/a&gt; </p>

<p>3 percent 1st-year, 2 percent undergrad at Rensselaer </p>

<p><a href=“http://www.rpi.edu/about/cds/CDS2008_2009.pdf[/url]”>http://www.rpi.edu/about/cds/CDS2008_2009.pdf&lt;/a&gt; </p>

<p>New figures for entering class of 2009 for each college will come out some time during this 2009-2010 school year, probably more or less around the time of the turn of the calendar year.</p>

[tokenadult]

<p>

Based on information given, tokenadult, it seems possible to be Hispanic and Asian at the same time. Am I correct?

</p>

<p>That fits the federal definitions, </p>

<p>[Persons</a> of Hispanic or Latino origin, percent, 2000](<a href=“http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/meta/long_68188.htm]Persons”>http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/meta/long_68188.htm) </p>

<p>which say explicitly that “People who identify their origin as Spanish, Hispanic, or Latino may be of any race.” I have met young people from Central America (they were not applicants to United States colleges when I met them, nor residents of the United States) who have Chinese ancestry and appearance but Hispanic cultural ties and Spanish as a native language. The world is full of people with interesting combinations of genetic and cultural heritage, and many people fit multiple definitions of “race” or “ethnicity” groups.</p>

[speedo]

<p>“I find it interesting, and full of good hope for this country’s future, that more and more college applicants are declining to self-report their ethnicity to colleges,”</p>

<p>It may be interesting but full of good hope for this country’s future, gimme a break.</p>

<p>Just a few facts: Median wealth of the average black American family around $5,000,
of a white family around $88,000, number of black males enrolled in college around 870,000, number in jail around 830,000. Percentage of student aid debt by non-white families in 2004 26% in 2007 36% Percentage of white SAT takers who had at least one parent with a college degree 62%, black 39%. I could go on and on. </p>

<p>African Americans are at a huge disadvantage when it comes to college access and to suggest that this experience should be disregarded is nonsense. Racism remains entwined in the fabric of everyday American life and cannot be disregarded when evaluating the background of candidates for admission to higher education. Federal law supports the rights of colleges to evaluate candidates based on a wide range of factors including race.
Attempts to undermine those rights and create some sort of twisted race blind admission policy fly in the face of the American reality and certainly are not “full of good hope for the nation’s future.” The op’s premise is deeply flawed.</p>

[tokenadult]

<p>I’m on record as being in favor of this kind of affirmative action: </p>

<p>[BW</a> Online | July 7, 2003 | Needed: Affirmative Action for the Poor](<a href=“Businessweek - Bloomberg”>Businessweek - Bloomberg) </p>

<p>I fully agree that being poor is a disadvantage in American society compared to being rich.</p>

[speedo]

<p>To repeat myself,</p>

<p>“African Americans are at a huge disadvantage when it comes to college access and to suggest that this experience should be disregarded is nonsense.”</p>

[mokusatsu]

<p>

The incentive for the Obama administration, therefore, is to steer clear of the haziness of Espenshade’s regressions and the possibly fatal (to current discrimination law) legal battles that they would engender should there not be a clean, regression-free disposition of the Princeton investigation. There is, accordingly, a strong need to find strong non-statistical evidence of whether or not Princeton engaged in improper discrimination. This may explain some of the OCR’s interest in expanding the investigation: they would really, really like for the matter to be decided by direct evidence and will go pretty far to obtain it. They might even end up performing, explicitly or implicitly, the controlled study that Espenshade did not.

The reported expansion of the OCR investigation was in 2008, pre-Obama administration.
[News:</a> Inquiry Into Alleged Anti-Asian Bias Expands - Inside Higher Ed](<a href=“http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/06/11/asians]News:”>http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/06/11/asians)</p>

<p>That article has an interesting fact, relevant to the present discussion.
“While **Li left the ethnicity question blank on his application<a href=“as%20Princeton%20allows”>/b</a>, he said that other questions that he was required to answer – his name, his mother’s and father’s names, his first language (Chinese), and the language spoken in his home (Chinese) – all made his ethnicity clear.”</p>