<p>I was reading the posts in the AA section and wondered. What if a person was lying on their application and said that they were a minority when they weren’t? I would think that people would do something like that to move ahead of people in the admission process. Am I being naive? How would admission’s really know with the thousands of applications they get?</p>
<p>The admissions office may never find out, but it gets complicated when you factor in interviews, recommendations, place of parents’ birth, parents’ education, last name, etc. Minority status is used by admissions departments in order to increase student diversity in experiences and viewpoints, so someone who puts down a false race but has shown no evidence of overcoming some disadvantage because of his circumstances or demonstrated any cultural involvement probably won’t get a significant boost in the first place. Beyond that, at many schools these applicants are followed through the application process with letters from minority affairs and special minority weekends, and afterwards the accepted students often continue to get letters and invitations to events. If a student is found to have lied on his application, his acceptance is rescinded. At some schools, no matter when they find out that something on the application was knowingly false, the degree is revoked. All it takes is one person in admissions matching a file with a face to get curious and a couple of calls later to find out the truth. Maybe the individual gets through college fine and goes off and becomes well-known; someone in the admissions department at the college he went to may look up his old file just to see what it was like and see that he claimed to be a race that he isn’t. It’s a dangerous game and not worth the price.</p>
<p>Also, admissions offices routinely provide the campus minority groups and advisors with information about incoming URMs so that the groups and advisors can reach out to the URMs. Such individuals easily could realize that a student lied about their race or ethnicity, and could inform admissions.</p>
<p>Most people in the U.S. also realize that there are far more disadvantages than advantages connected with being a URM in the U.S., so even if they could get away with it, most people would not want to check the URM box if it didn’t apply to them. They might fear that the label would follow them for life.</p>
<p>As a middle aged white woman told a black friend of mine (I am black, BTW), “When I was growing up, I always thanked God that I wasn’t born black.” She was brought up to think that all black people were lazy and criminal, so she felt fortunate to be white.</p>
<p>I don’t see how one could feel good about themselves knowing they lied to possibly get where they were. It’s also disrespectful to the purpose of the college in asking the question and disrespectful to any URM who might otherwise benefit. If the person is accepted, even if the college didn’t give any weight to that checkbox, they’ll never know if they would have been accepted honestly. For people with a conscience, that can weigh on it for years. No one should lie on the application. If the college rejects the applicant they just go somewhere else.</p>
<p>Also, for the small set of Native American applicants, checking that box doesn’t mean a thing if you don’t have the paperwork to back up your Native American affiliation.</p>
<p>I would think you will blow your cover when you meet your academic advisor in school.</p>
<p>Dont even think about it. By the way, they can also rescind your diploma once they find out, and in 4 years the truth will always come out.</p>
<p>You’d have to have started lying back when your parents signed you up for elementary school. It shows on some (many?) transcripts. I know when we sign up for IB tests and they ask for ethnic origins, our coordinator cautions us that we MUST put down the answer that matches whatever our parents signed us up in the school system as. If you don’t want to put that you need to go change what your records say. But they are probably going to be suspicious of that in HS. At any rate, even it doesn’t show on the information the HS sends, it could be easily checked by a call to guidance counselor and a quick computer search to bring up complete records. I would say the risk you’re taking is likely to backfire and therefore wouldn’t even be worth it. Because then even if you could get in by NOT lying, when they find willful intent to deceive, they aren’t going to feel bad at all about trashing your application.</p>