The extent that some kids go to prove they are native Americans are hilarious…not talking about you OP.
@ariessun Just wondering, now that you found out about your having 50% NA DNA, does this motivate you to find out more about your NA heritage? If you are now quite curious and planning on trying to find out more specific information, perhaps you also plan on getting involved in real tribal activities (if you can get more specifics) and to try to learn more about your heritage, therefore becoming more like the NA applicants they are seeking. I don’t mean to make it up, but if you have this genuine interest (which I think I would), perhaps you can write about it, and maybe even let them know how you plan on going about your research. Maybe in a supplemental letter if there isn’t a way to include it in an essay or somewhere else on the application. In fact, doesn’t Common App have an optional question at the end about writing about something extenuating? That might be a good place to write about it, if indeed you plan on learning more about and getting involved with your tribal heritage. Just a suggestion.
I blieve you only need to prove it if you are asking for money. No other race has to prove it, and in this day in age I don’t even know if they can ask. But financial aid is a totally different animal
At some colleges and other programs, “NA with tribal enrollment” is effectively a distinct category from “NA without tribal enrollment”. The latter is basically on the honor system like any other race/ethnicity check box, but the former depends on existing tribal membership criteria as determined by the tribes.
@OHMomof2 We got busy per your post above and my kid got into every school he applied to. And then he took a gap year. Glad I am done with encouraging my kid during his undergraduate college application.
I am Mexican. When it comes to putting my race on college apps I am conflicted on whether to put nothing or being factual and saying that I am Native American and Caucasian. Most Mexicans are mixed. I happen to know that I am mostly have indigenous blood (I am Aztec and another one that I do not know). However, I know that some schools ask for tribal registration. Since I am not a Native American from the US but rather from Mexico what should I do?
“Native American” is inclusive of non-US parts of the Americas.
However, you would not be in the subset that is “Native American with tribal enrollment” if you do not qualify for tribal enrollment or tribal enrollment does not exist for your ethnic group.
Old news perhaps, but WSJ is reporting this morning that the new DOJ is going after Harvard for its “refusal to cooperate” with its ongoing probe into alleged discrimination against Asians.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvard-faces-doj-probe-over-affirmative-action-policies-1511260380
I’m sure it’s not news to anyone on here, but Harvard in particular has a decades-long history of lying about and obfuscating admissions preferences (and grading and graduation policies) at Harvard College and some of the professional schools. Maybe we will get a little more “disinfecting sunshine” out of the latest probe.
@SatchelSF DOJ is “threatening to sue” if H doesn’t provide certain docs by 12/1, I’ve read.
Going to be tricky as FERPA conflicts with full record transparency here.
Here’s a not-behind-paywall article - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2017/11/21/justice-department-investigating-harvards-affirmative-action-policies/
^ Absolutely, @OHMomof2, it’s just a threat to sue for now. Let’s hope that they do provide the documents and that these get out into the light of day.
Harvard, in particular, has a problem making data available, although that is common to all schools. FERPA might not prove to be too much of a problem, so long as the data are “anonymized,” which is usually possible when dealing with large data sets. But I guess we’ll see.
With regard to Harvard’s reluctance to share the raw data, there of course is long standing precedent. For instance, Bok refused to release the data sets behind his 1998 “The Shape of the River,” and of course there is the Espenshade et al. study that is often discussed on here (both pro and con).
Sometimes, the data and policies, though, do leak out, especially as regards the professional schools.
For people who are interested, I could recommend the late Harvard professor Bernard Davis’ “Storm Over Biology: Essays on Science, Sentiment and Public Policy” (detailing some frankly shocking lies by the administration of Harvard Medical School, pp. 160-200 approx).
As well, some very interesting policies at Harvard Law School (and other elite law schools) can be inferred in Professor Stephen Carter’s book (pp. 15ff), the first chapter of which is available here: http://www.bluffton.edu/homepages/facstaff/bergerd/classes/LAS400/handouts/ReflectionsCh1.pdf.
Some additional color is available here (mostly discussing Yale, but applicable to Harvard as well, as discussed): https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-scandal-of-diversity/
All the above writers can be considered “insiders” imo.
Happy reading!
With regard to FERPA issues (basically, privacy concerns) and the DOJ action against Harvard, often the “sensitive” information like ECs or essays that could be used as identifiers, can be proxied. In fact, that is exactly what most admissions offices do anyway: they assign a numerical value to the quality of the variable being examined. The numerical value contains no identifier, and in the context of large data sets, reduce FERPA concerns imo.
It’s more easily seen than explained. For people interested, look at the example in this 2009 NBER working paper on affirmative action mismatch questions at Duke (see page 13; the rest of the paper is fairly dense): http://www.nber.org/papers/w14885.pdf. (Also, there is some very interesting information that can be teased out of that limited data regarding whether “other qualities” truly overcome academic deficits even in the eyes of the admissions committee itself.)
Something like that should work, and if you look at the complaint in the Asian Harvard discrimination case (https://studentsforfairadmissions.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/SFFA-v.-Harvard-Complaint.pdf) you can see that Harvard traditionally has used a similar numerical system, and there’s no reason to believe that that hasn’t continued (Complaint, paragraphs 112ff). In fact, and none of this will come as a surprise to many on here, it’s always worth being reminded of the genesis of “holistic” admissions and preferences generally, which you can read about in paragraphs 35 and following (largely based on the 2005 book by Karabell, “The Chosen…”).
Somehow I don’t think the DOJ just wants the admissions score, but they haven’t made public what exactly they did ask for, have they?
^ We’ll see… It’s a very different DOJ, and a much different climate in the US imo, and so we may be surprised at what ultimately leaks out. The scale of Asian overachievement is comparable imo to that of Jews in the early-to-mid 20th century, which as we all know led to sea changes in the student bodies at the elite schools by the 1970s at the latest. Prior to that period, I don’t think anyone thought that HYP students were particularly bright, although they were obviously influential due to connections and elite status. (A little known fact is that as late as the 1970s the school that had produced the most Nobel Laureates was the lowly City University of New York system! Not sure who is the “leader” today.)
Hey, I went to a CUNY in the mid 80s!
I think HYP were always seen as centers of power and influence. Still the case today.
LOL, @OHMomof2, didn’t mean to step on anyone’s toes by ironically calling CUNY “lowly”! I grew up literally across the street from Lehman College 
You didn’t happen to be at that campus, were you?
No doubt that HYP are centers of power and influence, in the 1950s, as now. That’s why the stakes are so high and the battles so intense.
I do think race-based affirmative action and discrimination raise very different issues from legacy, donor or athlete preferences, and that this also informs the political debate over these questions. (Even though most preference characteristics are of course based on the accidents of one’s birth, over which none of us has any control.)
The race preferences are “retributive” rather than just “redistributive.” Rather than just allocating a scarce asset based on some neutral measure (like, say, percentile representation in the population of the various races - in other words, a quota system), most defenses of affirmative action are predicated on some causation theory (for instance, because of “oppression” or “racism” perpetrated by proxies for the nonbeneficaries of AA, academic and other standards must be lowered for the beneficiaries). Inherent in such a system is an allocation of “blame,” and almost “retribution” (explicitly mentioned by at least some prominent left thinkers in the 1960s right through to today), which is always tough to swallow.
On the other side, many firmly believe that group differences in academic and certain other measures result from verifiable and durable group differences in intelligence, a position that has enormous scientific validation (really, it’s almost universal - see, for instance, the latest research discussed in Professor Haier’s 2017 “The Neuroscience of Intelligence,” which is a great and readable introduction to the state of the art). This side says, “Why should I pay the price for what Nature has created?” I’m not saying which side I come down on, but am just seeking to help answer a question often posed on here, namely, why is AA so resented while legacy/development/athletic preferences seemingly get a pass.
Vance Packard wrote in his 1959 book The Status Seekers that HYP took most of their students from SES-elite private boarding schools, but did admit portions of their classes from top performing students from public schools in order to maintain their academically elite reputation.
^ Absolutely right, @ucbalumnus, about taking the smart kids out of public school. But this was almost exclusively at Harvard (another little known fact is that as long as a century ago, at least 50% of the Harvard class was from public schools, admitted basically solely on the basis of the SAT and its precursor, the CEEB exam). Princeton and Yale were obviously quite different imo, and maintained their “clubby” atmosphere right through to the 1960s at least. When people on here decry the use of standardized testing, imo they should recognize that it was instituted to make the system more democratic, because intelligence in distributed fairly randomly throughout the social classes.
I’d actually argue that HYP haven’t really come quite so far as people like to imagine from their early 20th century iterations. The standardized tests are much easier today (look at the distributions of scores), at least insofar as being able to distinguish among the top 1% of students (and that’s what we are talking about here), and of course high school grade inflation is rampant making GPA less relevant. I bet there are still many inside “clubby” admits hidden within those entering classes. And, really, wasn’t that the intent of “holistic” admissions all along? To protect certain privileged and protected insiders under a smokescreeen of subjective and nonverifiable admissions criteria that in any event were never disclosed in any substantive way?
My only point in my original comment is that HYP never signified “very high intelligence” in the way that, say, admission to Caltech or “Princeton Math Ph.D” do today And it really still doesn’t, because we all know that plenty of not so stellar kids are admitted.
No, it was Hunter…and I came there from a pretty prestigious LAC at the time. I was kidding
I think HYP most wants to keep the educators of the elite rep, but also an academically elite rep…but not TOO much. Places like MIT and Caltech seem less concerned about the elite part and more about the academic. What are indicators of that? D1 vs D3 sports…admissions based more on academic stats than other factors, perhaps.
^ I should correct myself about intelligence being distributed randomly throughout the social classes. That’s not exactly true. There is a small, but significant, positive correlation between income (or, I’d imagine, between any other variable - like “wealth” or “neighborhood” or “parental education level” - that one chooses to represent SES) and intelligence. Nevertheless, every class and racial group will contain people from all points on the intelligence distribution, even if any intelligence level’s relative frequency among classes or groups can be very different. That’s why careful testing offers the best hope of identifying those talented individuals among any disadvantaged class or group. Last, the idea that test results are correlated with SES and are therefore not to be trusted, that’s basically not true. People who believe that confound the intelligence and chosen SES variable. More intelligent people will test higher, and on average they will be of higher SES, but we should be aware that SES does not “cause” the higher scores, nor does test preparation. Intelligence does.
Parental education level correlates strongest to child educational attainment (or school performance when compared with parental education levels in the school’s area), typically overriding other correlating factors (wealth, race/ethnicity, etc.) when they are in conflict. However, that does not say too much about any nature versus nurture arguments, since high parental education level tends to be advantageous in both nature and nurture.
Test preparation and other environmental factors do significantly influence scoring on many standardized tests. To the extent that higher SES increases access to test preparation, that confers an advantage on standardized tests independent of one’s intelligence.