<p>Deverly,
I’m wondering what you decided to do? I’m a reporter working on a series of articles on exactly this topic. Would you be up for a quick interview? If so, please respond and let me know. Looking forward…</p>
<p>history is nothing if not about amazing turnings of tables. decades ago there was a question about certain individuals who could “pass for white”. and now here’s others who think they might “pass for latino” funny how racism can reverse polarity and somehow pass for ok.</p>
<p>ABSOLUTELY!!! You need to be at least 1/4 Hispanic to check the box according to CollegeBoard. Hispanics are underrepresented in colleges today. Students fortunate enough to receive top notch high school educations because their parents are wealthy are going to receive National Merit Status and college merit scholarships. Are they smarter or have they had the benefit of an excellent education? Is that fair of them to accept merit scholarships? You bet it is.</p>
<p>Check whatever you can. I couldn’t get past the third post when I had to chime in. Just because you weren’t brought up hispanic means you can’t check the box? ***? I guess Obama wouldn’t be able to check the “black” box because his white mother and grandparents brought him up. My kids are half Brasilian. They can’t check the hispanic box, but they qualify for the latino box.</p>
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<p>The CB which administers the NHRP does have a 1/4 requirement. And other scholarship programs have their own requirements for who is considered Hispanic. However, applying to college is NOT equivalent to qualifying for NHRP or other scholarship programs. Please go to the Hispanic Students subforum and read the first post of the Definition sticky thread to see how Hispanic is defined for college admissions.</p>
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<p>You too should read the thread referred to above. Brazilians are included as Hispanic for NHRP. They are not considered Hispanic (there is no Latino box) for the CA. Yes, there are anomalies in the definition of Hispanic, please go to the Hispanic Students subforum and do a Search for Brazil or Brazilian to find threads where this has been discussed.</p>
<p>Yes. For the purposes of PSAT, SAT and other college admissions matters, your children are Hispanic. They are not required to designate themselves as such, but they certainly qualify. If one self-identifies with a culture that has Spanish as its primary language, whether the individual speaks Spanish or not, that person IS Hispanic for the purposes of the United States Census.</p>
<p>Two girls from the HS my sons graduated from went to Harvard. Frankly, everyone was shocked the first girl got in (she graduated after my sons…). She was a partier and considered ‘unreliable’ by many in the organizations she was in leadership roles for. She was a very good student in a class of very good students. No one could really figure it out until it leaked that she was 1/16th Native American and had self identified as such on her admissions. This had never been previously portrayed as a meaningful element of her life… But she played the card and won. Several years later, her sister- seemingly also ’ merely above average’ applied and got in. Legacy and URM. How can you beat it!!</p>
<p>My sons’ grandfather was born in Africa… to a family based in Africa. Were they ‘African- Americans’- no… but I am not really sure why having 1/16 great great grandparent a Native American made these girls any more likely to ‘create diversity’ than my boys were likely to create!
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<p>It might make you a more interesting candidate to write an essay on ‘why I did not self identify as an URM’ than it would to simply check the box… And then, you do not have to wrestle with your moral compass when you are clearly doing something other than is intended by the ‘rules of the game.’</p>
<p>The “rules of the game” are more complicated than the way you present them.</p>
<p>Maybe the girls you portray never did anything more than identify themselves truthfully. What a college does with this info is a whole other story.</p>
<p>Husband’s mother, grandmother and great grandmother were all either born or raised in Argentina. They came via Poland in the late 1800’s and stayed for several generations until the mid 1950’s. MIL was 25 when she immigrated with her parents. Although Jewish, she attended Catholic school in Argentina. In America, she spoke somewhat broken English with a heavy Spanish accent. There was no doubting she was Hispanic–white, Jewish, but very Hispanic in culture and language.</p>
<p>Husband was raised on Long Island in a basically non-Spanish speaking home (since father was a Holocaust survivor from Austria or Czechislovakia and did not know Spanish.) However when MIL and her brother and mother were together, they spoke in Spanish. So husband was exposed to Spanish culture/ language and even food.</p>
<p>So fast forward…what are my children? They are white, Jewish and if you count grandparents/ great grandparents backgrounds–Argentinian, Russian,
Austrian/Czech.</p>
<p>So are they not allowed to acknowlege their Hispanic background? Is only Russian and Austrian/Czech okay to identify with because that fits with the image of what you’d expect–whereas Hispanic doesn’t?</p>
<p>If your concept of Hispanic is non-white, urban poor–then my kids don’t fit it.</p>
<p>But here’s the deal, should they deny that they are 1/4 Hispanic because it doesn’t fit a stereotype? Should they say they are not Hispanic because colleges may give them an advantage?</p>
<p>The real truth is that my husband was raised by non-English speaking parents who didn’t graduate high school in the US (or at all.) My children are one generation removed from that.</p>
<p>So ulitmately how colleges use that info and why is up to them. D’s are answering the questions accurately when they say yes, they are hispanic. Yes, they are white. And go on to say that their background is also European (Russian, Austrian, etc.)</p>
<p>We are also giving colleges our address that reveals a good neighborhood and the colleges knows my H graduated from a top college and that I have a master’s degree and teach. They know our family income.</p>
<p>So after that, it is up to the colleges. Are they going to give my kids an edge over others because they are URM’s? Well maybe because then a college can seem more diverse–and so they are using D’s background to their own advantage.</p>
<p>And if that is what happens, I can live with it. And how would I ever know, anyway? How would I ever really know it wasn’t my kid’s essay, or talent or great recommendations that ended up giving her the edge to get into a reach school?</p>
<p>I’m sure that there will be people who will always say we gamed the system if she makes that dream school… but I will stick with the fact that she answered the questions she was being asked truthfully.</p>
<p>^^^^
The “rules of the game” are more complicated than the way you present them.</p>
<p>On the other hand, the rules might be less complicated than you portray them, and many would say that folks like you are gaming the system. And I would agree.</p>
<p>You know what uskoolfish, many Americans are mutts. Their grandparents and their great-grandparents came from all over and they married people from different cultures and sometimes different religions even. That’s what a lot of our families look like. Your children’s ancestors traipsed through Argentina. My Jewish grandfather was born in Dublin, my grandmother’s family came via China. My husband’s father grew up a Greek in Egypt and came to the US for university. He spoke 5 languages fluently and my husband and his siblings have cousins on every continent except Antarctica. Pretty interesting story, too. </p>
<p>But, in truth, this really has very little to do with my children and what makes them, in particular, interesting. So if you feel that somehow your child offers more diversity to a school than a child with say, my child’s history, because someone spent some time in Argentina… then, definitely you need to go for it and check the box.</p>
<p>The system is flawed and like all flawed systems there are people who can take advantage of it because of the way the rules are written. And, there are people who don’t get the leg up… and do just fine anyways!!</p>
<p>You are certainly entitled to your opinion regarding whether my children should get “a leg up” because their grandmother’s family lived for three generations in Argentina. I am not asking for “a leg up.” That is up to the schools to decide since I gave them a very complete and accurate background of who my children are. It would NOT be accurate to say they are not 1/4 Argentinian, the same way I would not deny that their ancestors are mainly from Eastern Europe.</p>
<p>Believe me, in my neighborhood, NO ONE would hesitate to check the box if it asked if a child’s background was at least 1/4 from Russia, Italy, Poland or Ireland. They would do so whether there was a benefit in doing so or not. I would check that box as well (and did)…in addition to the Hispanic box…whether there was a benefit or not.</p>
<p>The biggest misconception is that people believe that saying you are Hispanic is saying you are non-white. But that is not so and Hispanics can be of any race. There is a stereotype of what a Hispanic should look like and how they should sound that is part of people’s difficulty accepting whites as Hispanic. In Argentinam today, about 80% of the population is white and many trace their ancestory to Italy and Germany–arriving in Argentian at the same time as my husband’s family.</p>
<p>Why do the colleges choose to ask the question of ethnicity, race and religion? Is it fair? Should any of us respond at all? But if we do respond, I think it is our responsibility to answer honestly…which is what we did in the case of my D. </p>
<p>For the record, I had 2 very lengthy converstions with the people at the National Hispanic Recognition Program–explaining D’s background in length. They encouraged us to mark her as Hispanic. As did older’s D’s professor at college when they were studying race and ethnicity in a scholar’s program.</p>
<p>Of course, exploiting minorities is what this country does best.</p>
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<p>Exactly, the concepts of ethnicity and race are misunderstood by many Americans. Most people would benefit by taking a look at the CIA factbook, which demonstrates the wide range in racial composition in different Hispanic countries:</p>
<p><a href=“https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2075.html[/url]”>https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2075.html</a></p>
<p>I feel if you are checking a race/ethnicity box because you want to get an advantage in college admissions, you should be walking the walk. In other words, your child (and maybe the parents or grandparents) should have suffered some sort of discrimination based on said race/ethnicity. Of course there is no way to prove this, but people know in their hearts of hearts whether they are being honest or gaming the system.</p>
<p>Colleges don’t want URM just because they may have been discriminated against. They want diverse points of view.</p>
<p>Although slightly off the original point, would colleges be more favourable towards Czechs? Or do minorities like that not matter to them?</p>
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<p>Then if you had designed the checkbox, wouldn’t you have also added an additional question about whether you felt your family had suffered discrimination?</p>
<p>The box simply asks if you are Hispanic, yes or no. If you have even a drop of Hispanic blood, wouldn’t marking “no” be an out-right lie, as well as a rejection of part of your heritage? If you mark it yes, also mark your other races/ethnicities and take the extra time to note the fraction of your Hispanic lineage, you have been totally honest.</p>
<p>I don’t think marking yourself one-quarter Hispanic is any magical guarantee of acceptance, either. Silverturtle had incredible stats including a 2400 SAT, is 1/4 Hispanic, and didn’t get accepted to his first-choice Ivy League schools. I suspect many top schools have enough choice with that category that they now tend to prioritize Hispanics who also involve themselves in ethnic activities and perhaps write about their experiences in their essays.</p>
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<p>Hmm. What is the “URM” point of view of the ideal gas law? How to solve a linear system of equations? Or how to conjugate verbs in Japanese?</p>
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<p>There’s no URM benefit to being Czech, Slavic or Middle Eastern – they’re all considered white non-Hispanic. Italian-American associations once lobbied to include Italians in the URM listings and lost, so Italians don’t count either.</p>
<p>If we are talking about grandparents who suffered discrimination as the main qualification, then the “Czech” mark I placed for my father-in-law wins hands-down. He and one aunt were the only family members that survived the Holocaust. As a young teenage boy he was in 3 different work camps/concentration camps.</p>
<p>As for my mother-in-law, she arrived in the US as a non-English speaker at the age of 25. She was only really able to find employment as a seamstress because she could barely read and write English. And believe me she was never really socially accepted in the community that she lived. She had a middle class life syle, but was certainly an outsider and was considered “Spanish” by all who knew her.</p>