- Share This Post
- Pin It
- 0
- 4
-
Sparkle (1)
College applications give students plenty to fret about. The applications’ race and ethnicity questions should be one of the easy sections, just boxes to check. But evidently, they are not. And even though this short portion of all college applications is optional, it is causing applicants, especially multi-racial students, angst and agonizing indecision.
Now that college applications have expanded their ethnic and racial choices, students can identify all of their racial backgrounds if they want to. The Universal College App, for example, lists these choices:
- Hispanic/Latino
- Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander
- Asian
- American Indian or Alaska Native
- Black/African American
- White
But it’s not so clear if this kind of full disclosure is a help or a hindrance to applicants’ admission chances.
The hesitation on the race question centers mostly on affirmative action concerns. Now that we are over forty years down the affirmative action road, we all can acknowledge that there have been some good and not so good results. While more students of color have been afforded the opportunity to attend college, they have had to function under the shadow of affirmative action stigma and undisclosed and unclear school diversity policies.
As the New York Times reports, students are concerned about how they will be perceived by admissions decision-makers and ultimately by the college community at large if they self-identify as one race or all of their races. Aia Sarycheva, 18, who is of Russian (mother) and Sudanese (father) descent, told the Times that she checked both the black and the white boxes, not because she sought preference. This stellar scholar and future Yale student said she identified her ethnicities because they reflect who she is. But she said she was aware that others would assume she got in because she is black.
With regard to checking or not checking the race boxes, the general sentiment among students seems to be that applicants are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. African-American peers may accuse bi- or multi-racial kids for trying to gain preference by claiming to be “all black” or trying to gain an advantage by identifying as black “only at application time.” And their Caucasian colleagues might assume that the student gained admission preferences whether they actually identified with an under-represented group or not. Often, with this assumption comes the implication that students-of-color are undeserving of, and unqualified for, their acceptances.
This assumption that people-of-color have been placed in coveted positions solely due to affirmative action is still quite widespread today, and not just on college campuses. With regard to college admissions, it is extremely detrimental to the students who, in the midst of attaining their college dreams, are often called to question about their qualifications. Stanford researchers have found that this internalization of doubt is wreaking havoc on college student achievement. Based on studies that connect poor achievement to negative stereotyping (one study showed that black, Latino, and women math and science students perform poorly when their mistakes seem to confirm a negative stereotype about their group, and other studies indicate that negative stereotypes can prevent minority students from learning new academic material), Professors Greg Walton and Geoffrey Cohen devised a way to help students find belonging in college and thus perform better. Professor Walton says:
For students that are underrepresented, from social groups that are under-represented in an academic setting, who face negative stereotypes about their group and about their group’s intellectual ability, they may be especially likely to wonder, to feel uncertain, about whether they belong. They seem unsettled. They may be trying more than others to really figure out whether they belong.
This uncertainty leads to insecurity and fatalism which can result in poor performance. The Stanford professors found that with a short exercise designed to show the students that their difficulties were not unique to them or their group, their academic performances greatly improved.
The fact that this kind of self-consciousness and negative messaging has reached students as early as the application process is troublesome. The implications of these messages as they apply to college admissions are so mixed and confusing. They tell students that they may have an advantage in the college sorting process if they have minority status. But they also suggest that they are somehow lacking and in need of extra help, and that once they get in, they are lesser students. For bi-racial students who are part white, this is a conundrum, indeed. Do their under-represented halves compensate for their privileged halves? Do they dare reap the
