Reply to s/o - Cheating and Checking Diversity boxes

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[quote=Anonymous][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.

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.

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. [b]As far as I'm concerned (I was a first-gen Latino) that is how it should work. [/b]

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

This PP is correct. I am a former SLAC admissions counselor and we were all experts at sussing out the applicants who fit the profiles that we were looking for. Example, Cuban Maria Garcia from Coral Gables, FL who attends Ransom Everglades School ($45k/yr) with a law partner mother and surgeon father is going to be evaluated very differently than Salvadoran Ana Cruz from Wheaton, MD who attends Wheaton HS with a mother who is a cleaning lady and a father who is a mechanic. They may both check the same race box, but we know.

I agree with PP's statement that this is how it should work. The hope is that Ana Cruz's children will BE Maria Garcias in the next generation. For the white folks - do you not understand that this is what happened for your people a generation ago except the government fully paid for it? Y'all remain super supportive (or forgetful/willfully ignorant) of any handout that white people receive.

Have you heard of the GI Bill? Let's talk some numbers to help put this into perspective. There were ~16mil WW2 vets. 1mill were black, we will subtract them out, since they were denied GI benefits. So, we are left with around 15mil white male veterans (less the 350k women vets). Using 1950 census data: there were 150mil Americans total. ~135mil whites and ~15mil "nonwhites" (term used in census reports at the time). Of the 135mil white Americans in 1950, ~67mil were men. So, around 22% of white men were WW2 vets.

Why are these stats relevant?  In 1947, fully 49% of all students admitted to colleges in America were veterans. FORTY NINE PERCENT! Prior to WW2, the overwhelming majority of American college students were wealthy (white) elites. The GI Bill dramatically changed the American higher ed landscape and brought millions and millions of white Americans out of poverty and the lower middle class into middle class prosperity. The number of degree holders in the US DOUBLED from 1940 to 1950, even though there was only a 14% increase in total population from '40 to '50, because of the GI Bill. This is exactly why URMs and first generation college students are advantaged. The lasting effect of a system that America created to lift whites out of poverty, that WORKED, really well. Now, you and your children do not need, nor deserve a leg up, handout, additional support of any kind. You already got it. You are probably paying for college with wealth accumulated from the GI Bill house your parents inherited from your grandparents.

Black Tyler Jenkins' grandfather also fought in WW2, but he was denied those benefits, and came home with no opportunity, and Jim Crow still the law of the land. All while white Johnny Murphy's grandpa was able to go to University of Maryland, get a good federal job, buy a little rambler in Bethesda for $30k with a low interest, subsidized loan and the rest is history. You want to erase everything leading up to 2022 and say - well, we aren't racist anymore. Now, you've deemed the system unfair because it considers the set of circumstances that led to Tyler Jenkins at Montgomery Blair and Johnny Murphy at Walter Johnson and why Tyler has only one extra curricular activity because he works, or his parents need him to watch younger siblings while they work; all while Johnny plays travel sports, has an SAT tutor and a brand new Macbook pro.

This time in the past, where white people seem to think the racism occurred, is still here, affecting us all every single day. 
[/quote]
Is there any reason a wealthy Hispanic student [b]should not[/b] check the accurate box (Yes to the question on Hispanic ethnicity)? Do AOs simply filter through the Hispanic pile for the disadvantaged students and put the rest back into the regular pool, or does having checked the correct box hold any stigma for a wealthy student?[/quote]

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