Identity Box Vexes College Applicants

As elite colleges and universities seek to be more diverse, there is one section on the Common Application that has become increasingly loaded: the boxes where prospective students are asked about their identity.

Students know they face tougher-than-ever odds of admission and feel pressure to answer in a way that gives them an edge, college counselors and families say. Colleges, in turn, are frustrated because they have no way to confirm the information students give.

Questions college counselors are encountering from students and their parents include: Does partial heritage count? If a father is Cuban but you don’t speak Spanish, should you check Hispanic? Is it advantageous to declare yourself gay or bisexual even if you’re not?

At Friends Academy, a private Quaker school on Long Island, N.Y., a student whose family was Jewish and came from Europe checked Latino on his application, said Ed Dugger, the school’s director of college counseling, describing the incident from three years ago. When Mr. Dugger asked him why, the boy said his family had just taken a DNA test and it showed that he was 2% Sephardic— meaning he also had ancestors from Portugal or Spain.

“He felt that was going to give him a leg up,” said Mr. Dugger. “I asked him if he felt connected to the Latino community.” The student changed his answer to white.

Universities prioritize diversity out of the belief that students learn from being in an environment of students with different perspectives, said Mike Reilly, executive director of the American Association of College Registrars and Admissions Officers.

The Common Application is accepted by about 900 colleges and universities. More than one million students used it annu- ally to send about five million applications. The demographic section is optional but the response rate is 90%, said a spokesman for the Common Application. Students aren’t asked which race or ethnicity they belong to, but “how you identify yourself.”

Inside college admission offices, the question is prompting debates and raising questions over whether students are legitimate members of certain groups or trying to game the system. Some admissions officers say schools look for extracurricular activities that could reflect an applicant’s racial identity, such as participation in a Latino or African-American student group. The absence of any further mention of their background could be a red flag.

The goal is to determine whether a student will represent a minority community in a way that enriches the school, said Jon Reider, who was a senior associate director of admission at Stanford University for 15 years and then director of college counseling at a private high school. This places colleges in the awkward position of determining whether a student is “authentically black” or “authentically Latino,” he said.

The impact of an applicant’s race is marginal and one of many factors a school considers, admissions officers say. But when students are trying to get into elite colleges with acceptance rates in the single digits, any advantage takes on outsize consideration to some applicants and their families.

The Supreme Court approved the limited consideration of race in admissions in 1978 on the grounds that fostering diversity represents a “compelling interest.” Affluent white students have long bene- fited from a different set of advantages including legacy preference, athletic recruiting and the ability to donate money.

The focus on identity has grown as elite schools try to reflect changing U.S. demographics. At Harvard University, the number of freshmen who identified as white declined to 601 in 2018 from 739 in 2010, according to federal data. Over the same period, the number of Latino students rose to 176 from 144, while black students grew to 167 from 99. The entering- class size was flat.

In 2014, a nonprofit sued Harvard alleging the school discriminated against Asian-American applicants. A federal judge in October determined that the school’s admission policy wasn’t perfect but neither did it intentionally discriminate. The case has been appealed.

At Walter Payton College Preparatory High School in Chicago, a selective public school where 99% of students enroll in four-year colleges after graduation, conversations about race and admissions can be tense.

Richard Alvarez, a senior of Mexican heritage, is waiting to hear from the University of Chicago. He said his school has spent years educating students about race, but now that the college crunch has arrived, that sensitivity training “has gone out the window.”

“Everyone is at each other’s throat,” he said. “White students have this thing that brown and black students unfairly get into schools over them.”

Luke Martin, who just got accepted to the University of Chicago, said he checked off white, black and Caribbean on the Common Application because one of his grandparents is black and from Jamaica.

“I think it helps you stand out,” he said.

Some schools now consider sexual orientation and gender identity in admissions. In 2016, the Common Application added an optional box to fill out under male or female “to share more about your gender identity.” In 2018, 2.5% of students responded.

At least 28 schools and university systems ask applicants about sexual orientation, said Geeny Beemyn, coordinator of Campus Pride’s Trans Policy Clearinghouse, an advocate and resource for transgender policies at colleges and universities.

Duke University’s application includes an optional essay, telling students that “Duke’s commitment to diversity and inclusion includes sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression.”

The option was added five years ago because Duke admissions officers were seeing an uptick in students writing about their sexuality on the main essay in the Common Application, said Christoph Guttentag, dean of undergraduate admissions.

Race Issue Arose In Admissions Case

The purported advantages of lying about race figured into the sprawling admissionscheating scheme this year. William “Rick” Singer, the college counselor and mastermind who pleaded guilty in March, encouraged some clients to identify as black or Latino though they weren’t. He warned teens that failing to misrepresent their race could put them at a “competitive disadvantage,” said a person familiar with his business.

Marjorie Klapper, who pleaded guilty in the case, had a son who was listed on at least one college application as African-American and Mexican, though he was neither. Ms. Klapper was sentenced to three weeks in prison. Neither she nor her attorneys responded to a request for comment.

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Intellectual Desegregation: What Heterodox Thought Requires from Academics

Afew years ago, Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist, realized that most of his colleagues were on the Left. This is not necessarily a bad thing. People are allowed to have differing political views. It is also wrong to judge the quality of scientific research on political beliefs.

However, the uniformity of opinion presents institutional challenges. The academy is a church of skeptics. Progress is made when people are allowed to disagree. In the humanities and social sciences, a dominant mainstream may prevent questions that will deepen inquiry and identify errors and biases.

The solution, for Haidt, is not a new orthodoxy. One does not improve the academy by forming a conservative orthodoxy to balance a liberal blockade. As they say on the schoolyard, “two wrongs don’t make a right.” Instead, one needs a new academic mindset, one that makes it possible to move beyond conformity and groupthink. Haidt called this mindset “heterodoxy.” In this essay, I will argue for a habit of mind that heterodoxy should include: intellectual desegregation.

The very first step toward a genuinely heterodox mindset is intellectual desegregation. In other words, most academics find themselves in relative “safe spaces” where they encounter people like themselves.

There is an old joke about Richard Nixon that makes this point. A professor in a very liberal enclave, such as Cambridge, says, “I don’t understand how Nixon could have won—none of my friends voted for him!” Many professors and educators live similar lives. They live politically homogeneous lives. I don’t merely refer to the neighborhoods in which they reside. I also mean their intellectual lives.

For example, Inside Higher Education ran an article by a sociologist who critiqued conservatives. I was very curious to read the essay, but I shook my head as I read it. In the essay, the author accused conservatives of not having any ideas beyond demeaning women and people of color:

A third premise that should be strongly questioned is the very idea that conservative thought is diverse. What is diverse about a body of thought reliably in support of a reactionary status quo?

That statement shocked me. How would someone feel if he had written that men or women have the same ideas or that all people of an ethnic group lacked diverse thoughts? I doubt that this essay would have been written had the author spent time deeply reading classic texts of an opposing political tradition.

The underlying issue, I think, is that it is easy for intellectuals to segregate themselves.

There is so much to read and so much to do. It is very easy to say, “those folks are nuts, best not to bother.” Given a stack of papers to grade and piles of journals to read, what is to be gained by engaging with people who are so clearly wrong?

This question has many answers. Like we tell our students, we don’t know our own arguments until we encounter our sharpest critics. But there are also other reasons to pursue intellectual desegregation. Sometimes the other side is right. A critic may identify a genuine problem in your theory.

There is also a social benefit. If society sees the academy as a disconnected enclave, they will lose faith in our mission. If we show genuine engagement with ideas, even those we find repulsive or deeply in error, people will increase their support for the institution.

I’ve approached the problem of intellectual segregation from a lofty theoretical position. What would it mean for a professor’s daily life?

To start, we should drop the caricatures of the other side. For example, there is now a cottage industry of academics who are trying to prove that various conservative and libertarian scholars are all secretly racists who tried to reinstate segregation. The most infamous case is the book Democracy in Chains. Written by Nancy MacLean, the book argued that public choice economist James Buchanan inspired anti-black movements—even though his writings barely mention race and he supported the work of anti-apartheid academics. There is plenty to debate about Buchanan’s work, but the book’s positive reception among academic historians indicates that caricatures win the day. The first step toward intellectual desegregation is quality control—academics of all stripes need to stop relying on inaccurate smears of the other side.

Second, scholars should strive toward a new self-identity that strives for dialogue and engagement rather than conflict. Currently, the US is experiencing extreme political polarization, which means that people sort themselves into rival political camps. On campus, this means that many professors strongly self-identify with one political party or tradition. In doing so, they mitigate another identity—the disinterested scholar who seeks knowledge regardless of its source and follows data wherever it may lead, even if it contradicts our values.

Intellectual desegregation entails a balance of these two identities—the partisan and the disinterested scholar. We don’t want partisan identities to undermine our research, nor would we want to pursue research without considering our values. Once we modify our self-perception and move from a highly partisan view of scholarship to a more balanced one, then we open ourselves up to genuine conversations with writers who hold radically different views. This approach to academic life is not to surrender to the other side. It is a sign of maturity and enlightenment.

It is important to keep in mind that heterodoxy means discomfort. By dismissing caricatures and having meaningful engagement with people who disagree, we will need to accustom ourselves with some very painful feelings.

A conservative must learn to listen to the critical race scholars who list the worst moments in our culture. The socialist professor must really sit still as they listen to the historian who documents the sins of the Iron Curtain. If we can do that, we’ll build a better academy and a better culture.

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Australia: Millenial students are dropping out of trades courses as they hope to land a 'trendy job' flying drones or working as personal trainers

There has been a drastic increase in students dropping out of trades courses as they hope to get a 'trendy job' instead.

With more Sydney students opting for courses which have poor employment prospects such as 'fitness, outdoor recreation and flying drones' fears have been raised that it may lead to a skills crisis. 

Courses in auto repair, cabinetmaking and metal fabrication have seen a 28 per cent drop in enrollments - an overall 42 per cent drop in just two years.

Businesses already import foreigners to do the work and the lower enrollments leading the way to a 'skills crisis'.

Last year just under half as many students enrolled in hairdressing and furnishing courses compared to 2016. 

NSW Business Chamber CEO Stephen Cartwright said growth in certain jobs within the next five years are already experiencing skill shortages.

'Most of the occupations identified are already experiencing a skills shortage, are difficult to recruit into and are forecast for significant growth over the next five years,' he told The Daily Telegraph.

TAFE also reported 40,000 fewer enrollments last year.

He also noted a 'major concern' in students not opting for vocational education and training (VET) courses. 'The reduction in the number of students doing a VET qualification while they are still at school is a major concern,' he said.

'Students are being discouraged from doing a VET qualification by their school or by parents who have negative perceptions of VET and consider it as being lower than a university degree rather than as an equal alternative.'

He blamed parents and teachers for warning students off VET courses as below a university degree rather than the same.

The NSW curriculum is currently being looked over to note changes which would help students opt for courses with opportunities and VET courses.   

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