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<p>Jian Li actually, but we know what you mean. But according to the facts I’ve researched and tried to put into College Confidential’s FAQ thread on this subject, </p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/858679-race-college-admission-faq-discussion-7-a.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/858679-race-college-admission-faq-discussion-7-a.html</a> </p>
<p>colleges do NOT guess a student’s ethnicity if the student doesn’t tell the college, and a lot of colleges admit very large percentages of students who are reported to the federal government as “race/ethnicity unreported.” Current federal law requires colleges to ask, but it doesn’t require students to tell, and colleges don’t go out of their way to guess, it appears. </p>
<p>The Census Bureau, by the way, has researched family names and finds very few with a high reliability for identifying a person’s ethnicity. I have met Norwegian-Americans named Wang, for example, and families intermarry and adopt and do all kinds of things that make a guess of a person’s ethnicity from the person’s name less than certain. (On the other hand, if I saw the name Jian Li, with that spelling, my first guess would certainly be that the person is Chinese and from the P.R.C. besides.) </p>
<p>Join the discussion on the FAQ thread </p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/858679-race-college-admission-faq-discussion-7-a.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/858679-race-college-admission-faq-discussion-7-a.html</a> </p>
<p>if you’d like to discuss the broader issues. </p>
<p>Good luck to everyone applying this year.</p>