Colleges cannot have race-based policies or programs. From the Supreme Court’s opinion: “Nothing prohibits universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life, so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university.” A student can write, and a college can consider as part of its holistic review of applicants, an essay on how they always felt marginalized at their school as [insert group here] and thus are really motivated to join or start an affinity group. Or conversely, they can write, and a college can make a decision based on, an essay about how a particular affinity group was really important to them in high school and thus they want to join or start such a group.
My main point in responding to your comment is to set the record straight for OP that kids are not limited to writing about how their race/ethnicity has caused obstacles they have had to overcome. And while it is true that we don’t know about the student’s personal life history, I’m fairly sure that the student can work his ethnicity into an essay in an authentic way given the leeway provided by the essay prompts and the fact that, as noted above, students are not limited to talking about obstacles.
And in addition to correcting the “obstacles” statement, I was trying to convey to the OP my opinion that their child’s ethnicity, fairly presented and legally considered as part of a holistic review by colleges, is a powerful hook at SLACs and, in my opinion, makes him a legitimate candidate for admission at any SLAC.
I definitely agree about the breadth of ways in which a college can permissibly consider ethnicity-related individual experiences.
On the other hand, I am personally very unsure exactly what this will mean for admissions in practice. We have only had one admissions cycle so far under the new rules, and the evidence so far strikes me as ambiguous. Some colleges seemed to be getting observably different ethnic mixes versus other recent cycles, some much less so. And colleges may well modify their approaches for a few cycles before settling into something that is legal and they are comfortable with.
So I personally think the OP’s kid should follow some fairly standard advice about list formation, but that would include having some well-chosen Targets and Reaches. And if some of those then worked out, then whatever role this played may not be ascertainable even in hindsight, but they would have the benefit of it whatever it might be.
Kids (and parents) assume that the essay needs to be a “woe is me, I walked 3 miles in the snow, uphill, both ways and barefoot” in order to slip in the racial/ethnic component. But it doesn’t need to focus on overcoming obstacles.
I don’t know of any college (certainly the private top 100 or so) that want to go back to the days where their “diversity” was three handpicked Black students, a few Asians (of whichever dominant group was in their local area- they didn’t know or care much beyond that), an inadvertent Hispanic/Latino, and ALWAYS in even numbers so they could room together and then make up enough bodies for a suite after sophomore year.
Certainly the “highly rejectives” want to maintain and continue to build a diverse class, despite the ruling. So an essay which highlights the BENEFITS of a kid’s racial or ethnic identity (not the downsides)-- the culture, language, heritage? An essay which traces the kid’s interest in a particular discipline of study to their heritage?
These will not lead an Adcom to create or foster a systematic way of evaluating and admitting applicants based on race. They are personal essays which tell the adcom’s more about the kid- which in some instances, will also reveal (n a perfectly legal fashion) that the student may or may not be from an under-represented group on campus.
Exactly. Again this is one of the DOJ/ED examples:
Nothing about overcoming some adversity, but perfectly legal.
And in fact if you look at the essay prompts added since the decision, you can often see they are explicitly inviting these sorts of stories, while not excluding overcoming adversity stories.
All this being said, I don’t want to make it sound like this kid has to make a big deal about this. Whatever they are comfortable doing in response to a given prompt is fine, and whether and how that response references being Native American is up to them.
He is a sophomore….still time for him to raise his gpa!
I am not one for people being obsessively gpa-focused, especially not relatively young teens ( as long as they are curious and reasonably self-disciplined). However, medical school admissions certainly is gpa-focused and at at some point, he is going to have to become laser-aware of it if medical school remains a serious goal.
Having said this, I second William & Mary as a fine option to consider, if he can raise the gpa a bit, score well on ACT/SAT and/or write convincing essays, as the school is more competitive for out-of-state-students. In high school my D was so sure she wanted a LAC (Dickinson and Lafayette were among her choices) but once she saw W&M she was sold, and is now a happy senior (though not in biology or pre-med so I can’t speak to that). She finds the size of W&M (around 6000 undergrads) just about perfect. Small enough that you see friends and acquaintances everywhere you go, but large enough not to be suffocating. A few intro classes are larger (50-100) but most of her classes have had 30 or fewer students). Now she says she is glad that she didn’t go to a school of less than 2500 students.
On final note, my D is a minority (Asian/adopted) and has been very comfortable at W&M.