URM or multi racial?

Hi all

So I am 75% pacific islander and 25% white and I identify most with pacific islander but when looking at the common data sets for the colleges I am looking at like Stanford or Harvard they tend to accept very few pacific islanders. But these schools also accept a huge number of multiracial student. I believe I am qualified to go to these schools based on scores, grades and extracurriculars but does it benefit me more to put my race down as Pacific islander or pacific islander and white (multi-racial)?

Thanks

In general, there are more multiracial people than there are people who indicate Pacific islander only. However, multiracial can include many different combinations, so it may not be obvious how many multiracial people listed Pacific islander among their choices.

Both Stanford and Harvard use an opaque holistic admissions reading process where outsiders will not be able to answer specific items like your question (they may give hints about general themes of what they are looking for, but not to the level of detail you are asking, particularly with a political hot-button like race or ethnicity).

thanks for the response! I’ve really been struggling with what to put down given that I am 75/25. I saw that Stanford only accepted 7 Pacific Islanders and Harvard 0 and that scared me a little bit.

I had another quick question though. When looking at multiracial students do colleges look at what races make up that students background or are they all multiracial? So would a student who is half white and half asian be looked at differently than a half black and half latino student ?

They definitely look at the races, and half black/half latino would allow them to check two boxes for their diversity claims. Not so with Asian and white. Anyway as ucbalumnus said, pacific islander is better than mixed race for you.

I did not say that one is better than the other for the purpose of Stanford and Harvard admission. Only insiders know if it is, and (if it is) which one.