<p>just out of curiosity, but on the common application, it says which race you identify MOST with, not which race you were born with.</p>
<p>is that sort of a loophole?</p>
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<p>Don’t be absurd.</p>
<p>No. Most standard tests are like that now. There is a portion of students with multiple backgrounds, so they ask which you “identify most with” to yield opting out of other, and besides, they can’t say “you were most born with”.</p>
<p>I just love it when people who probaly identified themselves as white all their lives are suddenly a minority when it comes to college admissions. There’s some delicious irony in that, but it’s also pretty sad. As long as it can used to your advantage, right? :(</p>
<p>At apsfan:</p>
<p>There’s one kid I know that’s 1/4 Hispanic, and is putting that down.</p>
<p>Sigh.</p>
<p>hey dont judge him. no one said he couldnt do that. he just wants to get a good education, get money, get paid, and move up the evolutionary ladder.</p>
<p>What? I’m not judging him. He’s smart for doing so…</p>
<p>It’s just a bit unfair. And wth? You don’t move up the “evolutionary ladder” – social ladder, maybe.</p>
<p>apsfan: That’s exactly what I have been talking about for six months. I am as white as a person can be but a distant maternal relative was a full Native American and in a tribe that is small. She registered all of her kids and grandkids with the tribe, and I am a member of the tribe (I even get neat stuff sent to me each year from the tribe). Because I am an official member of a tribe, I am a Native American to colleges. My sisters went to Stanford as Native Americans, and I probably have a good shot, too. If I applied as a white person, my chances would be much less. I have good grades and scores, but nothing to seperate me from other white people. I will use my “hook” but it seems so stupid and unfair. I may be a member of a tribe but culturally and mentally I am not a Native American.</p>
<p>The new federal regulation linked out to in one of the first two posts in this thread </p>
<p><a href=“http://a257.g.akamaitech.net/7/257/2422/01jan20071800/edocket.access.gpo.gov/2007/pdf/E7-20613.pdf[/url]”>http://a257.g.akamaitech.net/7/257/2422/01jan20071800/edocket.access.gpo.gov/2007/pdf/E7-20613.pdf</a> </p>
<p>will begin requiring, next year, colleges to ask the ethnicity and race questions in a two-step process. First, the students will be asked about Hispanic or Latino ethnicity in a simple check if applicable question. Then, all students will be asked to “choose one or more” race, from the federal list of races, which is </p>
<p>White</p>
<p>Black or African American</p>
<p>Asian</p>
<p>American Indian or Alaska Native</p>
<p>Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander </p>
<p>with no particular definitions shown to the students. The new forms will no longer make clear that answering the question is optional, although that will still be the law, and students will still be within their rights to not answer the questions at all. </p>
<p>Good luck to all of you applying this year.</p>
<p>One last question, if anyone can please answer it CLEARLY?
If I put down as my ethnicity “unknown” instead of “Asian” at the Ivy League Schools, would I, statistically, have a better chance of being accepted? Secondly, even if I do put down “unknown” wouldn’t admissions officers still see me as “asian” because of my last name? (and don’t give me that “admissions officers are objective and fair” stuff cause it’s just not realistic).</p>
<p>Most likely, yes, they will guess that you’re Asian.</p>
<p>Actually I read this one article (though I don’t remember where) saying not to put down “unknown” because they’ll think you’re trying to hide something - i.e. assuming you’re white or Asian.</p>
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<p>There’s no reason to suppose so, because not everyone has an ethnicity matching the default assumption someone might make from a last name. (The Census Bureau has actually studied this issue. There basically isn’t any family name that is a 100 percent sure bet for identifying someone’s ethnicity.) The earlier link from the the Association for Institutional Research FAQ (I showed in post #5 way above in this thread) is on-point here: </p>
<p>[FAQ</a> Race/Ethnicity Topics](<a href=“http://www.airweb.org/page.asp?page=1502]FAQ”>http://www.airweb.org/page.asp?page=1502) </p>
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<p>The slow posting results in two versions of my reply showing up. The servers are being torture-tested today by high post volume.</p>
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<p>What you read in the one article is basically contradicted by the huge number of students each year who are admitted by colleges even though the colleges don’t know the students’ ethnicity. See [post</a> #4](<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1061012037-post4.html]post”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1061012037-post4.html) for the numbers, which should be updated within a month with new figures for the freshman class that entered in fall 2008. (As I type this on New Year’s Day 2009, the figures shown in the links refer to the entering first-year classes from fall 2007.)</p>
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<p>The unknown article is proved wrong by the large number of colleges that admit large numbers of students whose ethnicities are unknown to the colleges. There is a fairly extensive, but not exhaustive, list of such colleges in [post</a> #4](<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1061012037-post4.html]post”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/1061012037-post4.html) of this thread. As I type this on New Year’s Day 2009, the links shown lead to figures for the first-year class that entered in fall 2007 for most of those colleges. Soon the same links will be updated with information from the first-year class that entered this school year, in fall 2008.</p>
<p>tokenadult: Are you saying that it -is- beneficial for Asian students to check their ethnicity as “unknown” (or to skip the question, however the procedure works), since statistically Asian students have a lower chance of admissions at certain colleges?</p>
<p>Colleges don’t provide enough information to say for sure what is personally expedient. But if you think your ethnicity is to your disadvantage, why not just identify yourself as one human being among many (by declining to choose any of the ethnic categories)? Indeed, why not do that even if you think your ethnicity is to your personal advantage?</p>
<p>If human origins began in Africa, then wouldn’t everyone fit under the definition of “Black or African American”?</p>
<p>Race is fake. Colleges should not place this as a category, even though individuals don’t have to self-identify. It represents a society that wants to categorize based on superficial differences in appearances, also known as a pseudoscience (which brings it on the level of astrology, alchemy, and magic). People within a “race” are more biologically different than the different “races”.</p>
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<p>No, not by the federal definitions, which are linked to from one of the first two posts in this thread.</p>
<p>tokenadult, to answer your question–I am personally torn between identifying as one human being among many and identifying with the culture/ethnicity in which I was raised and to which I am undeniably tied. I was born in China, though I didn’t live there long, so my situation is a little different because I’m not of a fully-assimilated generation.</p>