Reply to s/o - Cheating and Checking Diversity boxes

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Context matters.

In the college application context, schools are trying to find Latinos who have been historically frozen out from higher education in an attempt to address their low representation among the college-educated. That's their motivation for wanting to know your race/ethnicity. And they (of the schools that care) want to create a critical mass of Latino students who can turn to one another for social support on campus. The last thing you want is for a kid to be the only one of their type on campus. Separately, they're interested in increasing the number of students enrolled who are the first in their families to go to a 4-yr college. Given that these are both institutional priorities for most schools, students who can check both of those boxes will be of greatest interest to them.

[b]Most selective colleges will have AOs who are familiar with the socioeconomics of different schools within their territory, so finding students from the lower income neighborhoods who indicate that they are Latino/Hispanic/Mexican American/Chicano will be prioritized over finding kids from UMC families who happen to have a grandfather from Peru. In UMC neighborhoods, they'll be most interested in those applicants who themselves, as kids, identify as Latino/Hispanic/Boriqua and who demonstrate in a variety of ways across their application materials that they will contribute something to the Latino community on their college campus. It's like playing that game "tell me you're Latino without telling me that you're Latino." If your kid can't do that and you live in NW DC or Fairfax, don't bother marking the box. [/b]

Marking the box might get your kid's application a second look when it otherwise would have gone into the rejection pile. But it won't ever be enough to get them into the accept pile without a lot of other things that make them stand out. At best, it might get your kid into the Latino pool, in which case they then have to be among the best in that group. And they will almost certainly have an AO who is an expert in recruitment of Latino students and/or a Latino themself. That person will be reading your kid's application closely and they will spot a poser in less than 2 minutes with their application.

My own kid (UMC, very rigorous DMV high school and courses and above average ECs) didn't get into most of the more selective schools. They speak Spanish as a native, studied it all through school, have Spanish names, etc... Marking the box definitely does not get you a free pass. If they'd attended school in a low-income neighborhood and had parents who didn't attend college, they'd almost certainly have done even better in the admissions process. But they ended up in a great place for them with merit aid, so all is good. As far as I'm concerned (I was a first-gen Latino) that is how it should work.

(I'm Latino and graduated from highly selective universities.)[/quote]

OMG.  You are so naïve.  They don't care about that.  They care about the numbers for their admissions data and so they can tout it on websites and in USNWR.  All the better if they get one that has the support at home and came from good schools so they don't run into problems with the curriculum.  Look at who gets in from wealthy schools and school districts.  If you have two kids of the same socioeconomic background, same high school, virtually same grades/ECS/scores, they will take the minority.  Period.[/quote]

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