I feel like there are ways they could figure it out. For one thing, his secondary school report might reflect their true race (in our school system we fill out demographic information). Did their parents decide to do this before they started school? So 18 years ago they changed their name and registered their child as Native American? And if they were truly Asian, and anyone did any kind of social media check on the applicants, they might have seen pictures that might have made them suspicious. There are people in our town who legit check the Native American box and I think they have some kind of documentation (even though they are mostly Italian but they meet the requirements). I just think the Native American hook would make most admissions committees at least poke around a little to see if the applicants are being dishonest. You are also putting a lot on the line by falsifying your records/application. They can rescind offers if they ever figure it out. More to lose than gain by making such an outright lie.
While race/ethnicity reporting is basically on the honor system in most cases, those claiming Native American are sometimes asked for tribal enrollment documentation. No idea whether Cornell does this.
Cornell is on the Common App, which asks:
What Cornell, or any other college, does when the box is checked “no” is another question.
- You have no idea why those kids were admitted to Cornell (if they actually were). So you cannot say what did or didn't "work".
- Perhaps because so many Americans have some amount of NA ancestry, many colleges DO ask for further documentation - tribal membership, for instance.
I eat kimchi also. It’s good for you, you know. I’m not Korean.
I’m going to call BS on this. I doubt most adcoms have time to go looking at social media. If they did, I can’t imagine any adcom assessing whether an applicant looks sufficiently Asian.
My point is that just checking the Native American box without documentation or as was pointed out before, without being able to substantiate it on common app, it might make the person reviewing the application suspicious. Since it seems like the Native American bump is quite a big one (the family in our town with this legit status has fared extremely well) I don’t think just checking the box alone would get you the bump. And I do think adcoms sometimes look at social media. I hear it’s slowing down but it used to be something you had to be concerned with and if I were applying to college now I would make sure my facebook page was pretty clean.
And it’s not just about looking “sufficiently Asian” it’s for other clues to see if you really identify with being Native American (although so many people check boxes that they don’t identify with…but I feel like Native American is less popular?).
They ask for tribal enrollment documentation presumably to discourage people claiming Native American based on family legends of great great great grandparents (or DNA testing these days) but who are otherwise not identified as such by either themselves or others.
In the admissions offices, generally speaking, are there any efforts to verify or even random audits performed on the applications of students that check URM boxes? Do adcoms always just take your word for it? I’ve often wondered this. Are there any former admissions counselors on this thread that know if this is ever done? Or maybe if there is any suspicion they ask the guidance counselor?
I think the checkbox isn’t that important if the rest of the application doesn’t show the cultural diversity they are looking for at the top schools. I believe there was a case where an applicant marked Hispanic and one comment on the app by an AO said the applicant didn’t show enough ‘flair’ which seems like code that this applicant really isn’t Hispanic.
@Dolemite I think that might be the case at some schools…but I think there are schools that are happy to admit you if you check a box even if it’s just on paper and not truly representative of who you are. I know of a few Hispanic box checkers in particular that definitely don’t have the “flair” (lol) that seemed to get into some schools because of the box they checked. Of course there is no way of knowing for sure.
I actually had to send in a picture when applying to one particular school 25 years ago. But even looking at someone is not enough as we have some family friends with a African American father and white mother and one of their kids in particular “passes” for white easily while the other kid has just has a slight year around tan and slightly thicker than normal hair but could “pass” as well. How one identifies can even be a slippy slope. A good friend from high school (racially a white male) truly identified as black man in his mind and was accepted as such by me and his peers at a mostly black high school, but could he put it on his college applications? Would he have been a lying when he identified as a Black man (especially culturally) as he was raised by a black stepfather?
" I believe there was a case where an applicant marked Hispanic and one comment on the app by an AO said the applicant didn’t show enough ‘flair’ which seems like code that this applicant really isn’t Hispanic."
The amount of stereotyping that happens is staggering and should be concerning, flair is code for not being “spicy” enough, a misguided assumption to make about all Latinx, similarly saying typical pre-med being code for Asian with high stats who plays an instrument. TM Landry shows the stereotyping at its worst - we love those poor black kids that struggle, we want the kids whose mom is on drugs and dad disappeared early in their life.
I recall an episode of “Everybody hates Chris” show, about Chris Rock where he’s applying for a scholarship and the white interviewer is at his house and is surprised that both his parents work and are not drug addicts, but because of that he’s not eligible for the scholarship!
The number has indeed declined to about 25%, it was about 40% 3 years ago. I’ve read the decline is because kids are using more “disappearing” (aka stories on insta and snap) posts and also make more fakes (finstas), so the effort isn’t much worth it.
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/25-percent-college-admissions-officers-check-social-media
https://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/ct-life-college-admission-social-media-20181203-story.html
…of course about a dozen Harvard kids had their acceptances rescinded a year or two ago over their social media posts. So lying about anything major is probably a bad idea.
Does that mean the 25% look at all applicants or only look at a select few applicants who they think for whatever reason the social media will be uniquely important to a decision? Regardless, I still think collegemomjam’s theory is crazy that some adcoms are going to be writing in the margins of the app: applicant claims to be Korean but facial features on Facebook look more Caucasian. If you go by the “one drop” theory I think you have advocated for in the past, physical appearance won’t tell you much anyway.
@roethlisburger perhaps you should reread what I actually wrote…first of all I was SPECIFICALLY talking about Native American in response to someone’s post that said they knew someone who changed their name from Kim to Kimn. I was reacting to a specific comment/case, and nowhere to I say this is my “theory”…
“I feel like there are ways they could figure it out. For one thing, his secondary school report might reflect their true race (in our school system we fill out demographic information). Did their parents decide to do this before they started school? So 18 years ago they changed their name and registered their child as Native American? And if they were truly Asian, and anyone did any kind of social media check on the applicants, they might have seen pictures that might have made them suspicious.”
So it’s entirely possible that an adcom MIGHT check social media (we know they have and still might, but as I agreed myself in an earlier post, it might not be as frequent as it used to be…)
You need to be careful to not take people’s posts out of context @roethlisburger especially when you aggressively say things like “I call BS…” or “I still think colegemomjam’s theory is crazy”…
I personally would appreciate it if you toned it down a bit.
And if someone asks you for college admissions advice, particularly for a top choice extremely selective school, would you tell them to not worry at all about their social media? Would you say this to them (I quote you below) and feel comfortable with the advice?
" I doubt most adcoms have time to go looking at social media"
Or would you tell them to take no chances because you really don’t know??
I didn’t advocate for it and it isn’t a theory.
It was the law, used to determine who could legally marry whom, drink from which fountain, access any of the advantages and institutions available only to white people. And it deliberately only applied to “black blood” - not Native American or anyone else.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/jefferson/mixed/onedrop.html will be enlightening.
Re: adcoms and social media, I only know what I read. You can probably google it as easily as I did.
Selective colleges generally do not ask for a lot of verification of race. I certainly doubt that they go around in social media to see who looks enough Black, Hispanic, or Native American. Appearance is an imprecise evaluation of race. In addition, extreme verification can go against goals of increasing URM enrollment. The Harvard lawsuit found that prior to the class of 2017, Harvard appeared to give a similar boost to multi-race Black applicants and single-race Black applicants. It didn’t matter if you looked White and acknowledged that were primarily White with only a small portion Black, you still got the full admission boost associated with being Black. Harvard classifies both single-race and multi-race the same way when reporting race percentages on the admissions page of their website at https://college.harvard.edu/admissions/admissions-statistics , so it benefits the college to accept White applicants only a time portion of Black ancestry. Again it doesn’t matter if you are primarily White, you still get counted as Black for the purposes of marketing on their admissions page.
While Harvard is not known for requesting additional information to verify NA heritage, some colleges do request applicants fill out a short heritage form where you can talk about who are your NA relatives and/or what that means connection means to you. This type of form is often more meaningful than asking whether you are enrolled in a tribe. For example, according to 23andme, I an 99.8% eastern hemisphere and 0.2% unassigned. Nevertheless, I am a member of a federally recognized tribe. My mother registered both her and myself as tribe members a way to connect with the small town where she grew up, which borders their reservation… learn more about the history of the area through mailings, social/cultural connections through PowWows and related social media posts, etc. The only requirement to be a member is new members being able to trace ancestry to a known tribe member, no matter how distant, and apparently someone on my great great grandmother’s side did this trace. I expect that this particular tribe’s background has a lot of Mulattos pretending to be NA to escape slavery, as well as some descendants of lost Roanoke colony, so it’s quite possible to be a tribe member with 0% genetic NA background. I did not apply to college as NA, but I imagine it would have been easy to do so.
IIRC, you’ve said in the past you believe colleges should give a URM boost to a student if they are one drop black or something equivalent.
I would tell them that if they check the African American or Hispanic block, no adcom is going to second guess them. It’s purely an honors system. In the unique case of NA it may depend on tribal affiliations. In zero situations will social media affect someone’s URM boost.