<p>I may be wrong (and someone please correct me if I am), but my guess is that minority status will only help an applicant if he reports it on his application. That’s where colleges get their statistics; from the self-reported race on the students’ applications. Once admitted, they don’t ask for that info again, nor to they ‘assign’ a race if they learn or suspect that a student is a minority. They use the info that the students originally provided. Students who decline to report a race on their application just aren’t figured in to the school’s racial demographics.</p>
<p>Colleges want diversity for many reasons, but a big reason is so they can say, “Look, our campus is X% Hispanic, and if you don’t believe it, here are the records that prove it.” While a minority student may contribute to the school’s actual diversity, if he didn’t report himself as such, he doesn’t ‘count’ toward the statistics and therefore is not ‘helping’ the school in that respect. If an adcom is specifically looking for URMs to increase diversity, I suspect they’d choose one who reported himself as such over one who did not.</p>