My oldest DD is a high school junior and we as a family have started the whole college process. I am philosophically against using race in any applications as I firmly believe in a meritocracy. Socioeconomic to me are different than racial distinctions.
Based on a DNA we have a decent % Hispanic based on grandmother from Spain. Truth however is we have never identified as such and this would be dishonest in my opinion.
What I’m thinking is for DD to remove all race identifiers from transcript and have her skip these questions on the applications. I’m not trying to game the system but instead not participate in a system that I feel is unjust.
I don’t see any problems doing this but I understand that things like this sometimes have hidden pitfalls. Has anyone done this? Are there potential problems in doing this for DD?
Odd that your kid’s high school puts race or ethnicity on the high school transcript… removing it would be something specific to your kid’s high school.
If you are against that, why was it on her transcript to begin with? Just because her HS transcript says something doesn’t mean you have to check the URM box on her college applications. This is a non issue
Is that how you identified your child when you filled out the paperwork when she started kindergarten. That kids where the information is coming from; whoever registered the child for school (the parent fills our all of this paperwork)
Wow! That seems to be such a bad idea from the school’s standpoint, it’s hard to imagine why they would possibly do that. Then again, as much as I love this state, it’s not exactly known for good decision making. Add this one - listing a kid’s race on a HS transcript - to the long, long list of bad FL ideas.
Regardless of how you think race or ethnicity should or should not be used, it seems like a useless bad idea to put it on transcripts, though it does not have any significant effect on admission for those applying to Florida (or California) public universities.
It is on the transcripts because it is reported to the federal government (and maybe the state) to account for the diversity of the school, district, etc. I really, really doubt the colleges pay any attention to it. I didn’t even know all the things attached my kids’ transcripts until we went to college orientation and we were missing the vaccination record. The admissions person called over to the registrar’s office and there is was, attached to the transcript. The high school was in Florida, the college was in Wyoming, so I assume this is common since the admissions person knew to look for it attached to the transcript.
I’m not sure the school will remove it from the transcript since it is an official record. If you don’t want to mark it on the common app, don’t. You should then be reported as ‘other’ and not counted as Hispanic ethnicity on the race information reported by the colleges to the data collection programs, including the federal governments.
Families self report ethnicity when kids enroll in school. School districts are required to report this information to our state. They are not identifying YOUR kid, but must give the overall ethnic count.
When your kiddo applies to colleges she does not have to indicate ethnic background at all.
I would imagine your school will remove it from the transcript if you request this.
I know our district reports race to the federal government and when I used to write grants I used their numbers. But that doesn’t mean the info for an individual child has to appear on a high school transcript. It certainly doesn’t appear on ours. It’s not the norm in every state.
Agree that as far as the OPs question - does her student need to report race on a college app - there isn’t a problem.
I’m reacting to the potential issue with school recordkeeping. Our district schools have had some awful issues with student records, confidentiality and appropriate data gathering and security, so I’m very sensitive to the issue of what is being reported, where it’s recorded and who has access. A few things I’ve seen at our FL public school:
School forms routinely ask for information that is not needed, such as the student’s social security number. Worse yet, they do not keep those records secure. There were no less than three standard forms each year that ask for that info and then are kept in unsecured areas of the school where volunteers and students have access. Also on one of those forms is a space that asks for mother’s maiden name. With this information, ID theft is a real risk and there is absolutely no reason for a school to ask for it, especially if they are not going to keep the information secure.
The clinic requests that students needing Dr authorization for taking medication have the Dr fax the authorization form to the fax in an unsecured common area. So forms containing student identification information, health information, medical diagnoses and RX info is sent to a fax that students, parents and volunteers wander past.
If your student takes a medication that the nurse dispenses, the recordkeeping to track the medication is a master form that lists all the students and their prescription. The parent has to sign a new RX in when delivered, and when the parent is signing the master form that parent can see the name and RX of all the other students taking medication. Not appropriate or confidential.
The race and ethnicity might be on the school district’s records, and the high school may not be able to change them.
The school and the district do not care what you put on the forms. When we moved to Florida I got a stack of papers to fill out for my kids. First question was mother’s name (easy) but then asked relationship. What? Choices were Natural mother, step mother, foster mother, or legal guardian. None of those were applicable. She is my child through adoption. Didn’t fill it out, never filled it out all the other years either. No one ever asked, they always gave me information about her.
Why ask if you don’t care what the answer is?
I also refused to give them (or the many dentist who asked) SSNs. That was also a question on all forms for my kid to play hockey. In these hockey files are also a copy of the birth certificate and a lot of other info, which are kept in an unlocked file cabinet, are given to the ‘team moms’ in binders to cart to tournaments to prove age. Very secure. NOT.
A transcript for the student need not contain every bit of information that the school knows (or thinks it knows) about the student. Race or ethnicity is irrelevant to the purpose of the transcript, so there is no real reason for it to be there.
For Hispanic, we used the National Hispanic Recognition Program’s rule of 25% hispanic…my dd’s grandmother is hispanic. If you ask her what her “ancestry” is, she would identify more with hispanic than from my side with people who came to America in the 1600’s.
Of course, some Hispanic people are descended from people from Spain who came to America in the 1600s and/or the indigenous people who came to America millenia before anyone from Europe knew that America existed.
^^Heck yes, here in NM, a substantial portion of the local Hispano population are descended from people who were in the what is now the US decades before my daughters’ DAR ancestors (among the first settlers in VA) were.