| There's quite a difference between checking off a provided "race unknown" box and expecting the 17 and 18 year old applicants to jump through hoops to make their statement. In any movement, there are thousands of people who passively harbor opinions for every one activist. This does not mean the former group disagrees with a policy any less. I can't speculate as to what the outcome would be if colleges made it equally easy to leave out all those other details, but I find it unfair that you would uniformly label such people as inconsistent.
It so happens that I know of students who chose to omit race because they wished to be evaluated solely on merit. I know of students who chose to omit gender in situations where it would likely have helped them. I know a student who was even happy to omit a legacy connection (given a situation where he could do so without explicitly circumventing the "parents' educational background" part on the form). But I can't generalize this to the entire applicant pool, and you would no doubt argue that such students must be in the minority. |