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<p>Sorry to inform you that there is neither an opportunity or a flaw. Did you notice that those are racial, not nationality categories? You never qualified, period.</p>
<p>Tell that to the kid that I know who had did it and got away with it and is now at Columbia (with a 3.5 UW gpa)</p>
<p>Yeah, I’m sure that both of your stats, extracurriculars and essays were all exactly the same, and the little box you checked for race made the only difference in who got in.</p>
<p>Just because s/he got away with it doesn’t mean that it’s a good practice to use.</p>
<p>But you aren’t African American; your father is. Were you born in Africa? No. Therefore, you are not an African American. If you still are willing to pull that daddy card, you are of Northern European decent. Your dad’s grandfather probably was Dutch.</p>
<p>I’m from Bermuda. Literally all of my family currently resides in either Bermuda, the Azores or the Grand Caymans. For those who don’t know, Bermuda and the Grand Caymans have a majority population of Afro-Caribbeans, though Bermuda is part of the UK (a British colony). The Azores have a population of mostly Portuguese decent. </p>
<p>Because all these are islands, or chains of such, my roots trace farther back to France and Russia. It makes a lot more sense to say “I’m French Russian” than “I’m Bermudian Azore” mostly because people start asking dumb questions, but also because it wouldn’t make any sense for me to refer to being of a descent that is essentially a nonsensical moniker for something else, or does not exist. </p>
<p>I am probably more black/hispanic than your average white chick. </p>
<p>But I’m still going to check “white”. Mainly because I’m white.</p>
<p>david - That’s not really good reasoning. Under that logic, nobody who wasn’t born in Africa is African-American.</p>
<p>African-American is a dumb term, anyway. Not all black people are from Africa. Less ambiguity in the choices for the ethnicity question would stop situations like this from coming up.</p>
<p>Here we go again… Affirmative action trolling white and asian people yet again.</p>
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<p>I think 99% of all “race”/ethnicity questions asked are answered in tokenadult’s opening posts.</p>
<p>And I’ve never understood why people who support racial preferences are surprised when people have “identity issues.”</p>
<p>Yes, the lead-off posts in this thread are meant to be FAQ posts, which means that applicants can take their time to read them carefully, following the links, and digesting the information posted in them. (The topic sentences cover the main points for applicants on a tight deadline for applying.) I’m making an assumption here that applicants to college, and especially parents of applicants who are themselves college graduates, will be able to read challenging material longer than one blog post. </p>
<p>From here on, the thread is mostly for civil, informative discussion that fits the Terms of Service here </p>
<p>[College</a> Confidential - FAQ: College Discussion - TOS & FAQ](<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/faq.php?faq=vb_faq#faq_new_faq_item]College”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/faq.php?faq=vb_faq#faq_new_faq_item) </p>
<p>that answers other questions College Confidential participants have about college policies or governmental policies related to applicant or student race and ethnicity identification. Welcome aboard. </p>
<p>After edit: from time to time other threads that start off with blatantly false and misleading information (as one last night, after this thread was posted) are merged into this FAQ thread so that readers will be able to find reliable information by scanning the forum topics or by searching with College Confidential’s search interface. That occasionally messes up the order of replies in a thread a bit.</p>
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<p>The former thread that included the quoted text (by someone who evidently didn’t read the previously posted FAQ) has been merged into this FAQ and discussion thread. Some replies above are a bit out of sequence after the merge, but quoting text helps with that. </p>
<p>Any college applicant from anywhere, applying to anywhere but the sole federally operated Bureau of Indian Affairs college that actually cares about American Indian tribal affiliation, can apply without identifying race at all. But if you want to claim to be “African-American,” you had better be someone who was called “black” or “coloured” under apartheid in South Africa. To do otherwise is fraud. It’s in the FAQ posts above in this thread.</p>
<p>Yes, there is an issue when threads or posts get merged. And, I felt the “Black” question, vis-a-vis states in Africa, was laid out by TA, starting: According to OMB, ‘Black or African American’ refers to a person having origins in any of the Black racial groups of Africa. South African American is not necessarily Black. </p>
<p>Beware thinking identity gets some sort of admissions privilege. Or short-shrift. When reviewing an app, yeah, you look to see the kid’s name and hs, parents’ education level and self-identification. Ah, but then you you look at the rest of the package- the candidate has to qualify and look like he/she will fit and thrive to get past early rounds. Despite the popular myth that you didn’t get in so some dumber URM could. Or because you are Asian. You’d have to actually see application packages to understand just how great some kids are- and how many top-stats kids present themselves as “average,” easily set aside.</p>
<p>I’m wondering how many of the kids who don’t give their race are actually Asians not wanting to be turned away by an admissions office worried that there are ‘too many Asians’. That was my first thought at seeing the high number at William and Mary – wondering if it’s Asian kids from Northern Virginia who worry about the overrepresentation of this group, and I also wonder if guidance counselors ever encourage kids to leave out the information. </p>
<p>I find the conversation funny because our ancestors are from Central Asia (former Soviet Union) and yet apparently we are not classified as Asian, even though our ancestors are from Asia. I’m thinking we’ll probably go with ‘decline to specify’ for that reason.</p>
<p>Momzie, I think the rare research that has been done on this point suggests that the majority of students who don’t mark a race on a college application form are much like the majority of the United States population–that is, likely to be socially identified as “white.” But there is the whole variety of America among the people who don’t mark any choices on the forms. There are a lot of different reasons for doing so (including inadvertence at some colleges) and no reason for a college admission officer to make an inference one way or the other. </p>
<p>As you suggest, the definitions are more than a little arbitrary, and don’t fit all countries of the world.</p>
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<p>If that’s the case, then why do certain interest groups try everything they can to prevent civil rights initiatives from appearing on states’ ballots?</p>
<p>Do the colleges only see what shows up when you press the “preview” button on the Common App? Because in that case, it shows that the person is Hispanic, but not the country of origin. But I thought I heard that they considered the country of origin. How is this possible if it is not seen on the Common App (according to the preview version).</p>
<p>Also, if that is the case, why ask country of origin in the first place?</p>
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<p>That’s a good question, and for the specifics of what colleges see when someone submits the Common Application, maybe the best place to ask the question is in the Common Application subforum here. Some colleges, I have read, do distinguish Hispanic applicants of different national origins in the admission process. I don’t know how commonplace that is. All the federal reporting requires is the overall Hispanic ethnicity category, with no other details about national origin. </p>
<p>Good luck in your applications.</p>
<p>Some schools take the information on the common app and format it into their own system. So, they won’t get the exact “preview” version because many have to extract the text and input into their database.</p>
<p>For all the students who game the system, i.e. put down ‘black’ when they’re not, would admissions have any way of checking out whether this is true?</p>
<p>In principle, admission offices can check any factual statement claimed on an admission form if they doubt it. They are surely fooled every once in a while by statements of various kinds, but several colleges have procedures for checking on how students do in college after they are admitted, which are used to refine admission criteria over time.</p>
<p>If your parents are of significant Native American descent but neither they nor you are registered with a tribe, can you still call yourself Native American? In my case, both my parents are from South America and have obvious indigenous American ancestry as well as white ancestry. I feel that if I just check “Hispanic” and “white,” colleges will assume I’m someone of full Spanish or Portuguese descent and therefore not consider me a minority. Moreover, if I don’t say that I’m Native American, I’d be leaving out an important component of my identity.</p>