Ok, I am late to this conversation, but I did want to add one consideration that I didn’t see discussed here. The consensus seems to have been that students should not include demographic in their chance me threads anymore. I get the reasoning, and I agree that is at best unnecessary and at worst misleading to include race in chance me threads. However, my only hesitation, is that leaving the info out may make it less likely for posters to suggest college access programs, fly-in programs, and scholarship sources that are open to students based on demographics.
For example, Questbridge gets mentioned on CC often as a possibility for low income students, but the Gates scholarship, which is only open to Pell eligible minority students (including African American, Native American Indian/Alaska Native, Asian & Pacific Islander American, and Hispanic American students) is almost never suggested to students. Nor are any of the single demographic group scholarships aimed at specific minority communities or LGBT students. The standard advice here is that students should concentrate primarily on merit scholarships offered by the colleges themselves, and it is not worth the time to apply to research and apply to national ones, but as a parent of kids that won such scholarships, this advice has always struck as a little surprising since I think there is overlap between the students competitive for Questbridge and those competitive for these other scholarships. There seems to be a belief that these resources for low-income students are only open to underrepresented minorities, but that is not always the case --sometimes the eligibility is wider. And sometimes it is narrower; for example, Dartmouth has a fly-in that is only for Indigenous students. Or for students who are asking for advice as rising juniors, hearing about programs such as Thrive Scholars (open to students of color and first generation students) could be useful given their help with college advising.