So I took the 23 and me test and my results are below:
East Asian & Native American 51.9%
Southeast Asian 43.6%
-Philippines
• Chinese 6.5%
• Broadly East Asian 1.0%
• Broadly East Asian & Native American 0.7%
I
European 47.7%
• Eastern European 10.6%
• French & German 9.9%
• British & Irish 7.3%
• Iberian 3.7%
• Scandinavian 1.9%
• Finnish 0.5%
• Broadly Northwestern European 7.0%
• Broadly Southern European 1.5%
• Broadly European 5.1%
I
Broadly Melanesian 0.2%
What am I supposed to check on my college app?
This is my first post so idk what forum its supposed to go under.
I think the underlying question here is, since the OP is Asian and white, both commonly considered hurdles on college admissions where diversity is a big factor, what can she/he pick that will be least disadvantageous to her/his application.
It is an interesting question, but you also have to take into account each child in a family can potentially inherit a different % of each parent’s heritage. I grew up believing I was half Irish and half French. My DNA results came back half Irish but then a quarter Norwegian and >10% French. However, siblings tested out with higher %s of French.
So, what does that make me?
Or the woman who learned rather than being 100% Irish Catholic, she was 50% Jewish heritage - and later, after much investigation, learned her father and another baby were accidentally switched in the hospital? Would you consider her Jewish, which is both a heritage and a religion, when she had been Catholic all her life? Granted learning the Jewish origins can have significant genetic implications, but does that change her heritage?
Realistically, the categories on most applications are so general it really doesn’t matter much. Native American is the only identify I know of that can require testing to be placed on tribal roles. Otherwise, yes, I lean towards checking what you have always understood your heritage to be. In this case Asian and Caucasian would pretty much cover it unless it breaks down to the level of Filipino.
It seems like your DNA tests indicate what you already likely knew about your racial category (although it may have brought to light some ethnic history you may have not known about).
It is appropriate for you to tick Asian, White, or Mixed Asian/White.
Race/ethnicity (and positive or negative results from it) are generally social constructs (including in this case), rather than strictly DNA-based constructs.
^ in DNA tests, “European” means “related to people whose ancestry is not Africa, the Caribbeans, Asia, or the Americas”. That usually means “white”, even if in daily language “European” means “from Europe” and thus can include people of any ethnic group.
The Native American part is misleading if that’s one of the things that you may be thinking would give you an advantage. Many people with East Asian ancestry have DNA results that indicate Native American heritage, but that’s only because Native Americans are descendants of Asians.
My daughter, adopted from southern China, has the result of 100% East Asian and Native American. 77% Chinese, 22% Southeast Asian, and .08% “Native American”. I sincerely doubt any of her genetic material originated in the Americas - it was the other way around.
Plus, if you indicate Native American on the Common App, it will create a pop up box that asks if you are an enrolled member of an Indian Tribe. That ethnicity is the only one on the common app where “proof” is required - by documented Tribal membership (with a membership number).
Just be honest on the App. There are a lot of colleges that DO consider Asian ancestry a positive in their goal to promote diversity on campus despite the general consensus that being Asian is a “bad” thing that dooms one’s prospects. My older daughter, 99% Chinese according to DNA results, was offered diversity scholarships at two of the colleges she applied (one a top 50 LAC and the other a top 25 National Public University). She was also offered full tuition scholarships at two lower ranked LACs and her ethnicity was most likely was a factor. Those schools were in the Mid-Atlantic/Southeast/Midwest.
Not really. Each child will inherit 50% of his DNA from one parent and 50% from the other (each parent contributes one and only one chromosome for each of the 23 pairs, but of course only males can contribute a Y sex chromosome). So, ancestry is fixed across siblings with the same parents. Without getting too technical, the reason that same parent siblings will sometimes show different percentages of ancestry is due to the sampling and identification methods used to determine the ancestry; in other words, it is measurement error. 23 and me gives a brief overview of its sampling methodology here: https://www.23andme.com/ancestry-composition-guide/.
The percentages that are given in a typical report are really only decent approximations within race, but across race are much better.
Not exactly. Yes, each child inherits 50% of DNA from each parent. But they don’t inherit the same 50%, or every sibling would be an identical twin. There is genetic recombination that occurs during fertilization, and even fraternal twins have differences in their DNA due to what DNA is retained in the sperm and in the egg.
Some of the differences definitely are due to the immaturity of the testing techniques, but some are also due to the natural variance in the DNA inherited from each parent.
