The Race Classification GapPosted in Articles, Campus Life, New Media, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2011-02-23 01:42Z by Steven |
The Huffington Post
2011-02-17
Daniel Arrigg Koh, MBA Student
Harvard Business School
Growing up as a person of Korean and Lebanese descent, I was proud of my heritage and enjoyed discussing it with my peers. While few had ever met anyone with such an ethnic background before, people were always eager to learn more. I always felt that it was a valued part of my identity—something that could happen in few other places but the United States. However, when it came time to apply to colleges, I quickly realized that conveying who I was would not be so easy.
On many of the applications I read, the choices were limited to “Caucasian,” “Black or African-American,” “Asian,” “Native American,” and “Other.” Some offered the opportunity to “write-in” specific races. On the whole, a significant portion of colleges did not allow me to represent myself accurately on the application. This issue symbolizes a significant problem with race identification in America, one that, with the increasing diversity in this country, deserves to be addressed with all possible expediency.
University admissions often state that their reasons for asking demographic information are legal and informational only. From a research and sociological perspective, it is understandable. However, the current system falls far short of the detail that educational institutions could and should collect. For example, many schools prohibit “ticking” more than one race category, or instead provide a category entitled “multiracial.” This forces someone like me to either “choose” a race to be represented as or indicate “multiracial,” which on its own means very little—nearly every person in America is “multiracial” by some standard…
…This “classification gap” has other serious implications. For example, a 2007 study by Princeton and University of Pennsylvania researchers revealed that black students from immigrant families (defined as those who have emigrated from the West Indies or Africa) represented 41% of the black population of Ivy League schools vs. 13% of the black population of 18-19 year-olds in the United States. This information is striking and important in our nation’s focus on closing the achievement gap; however, the status quo of race classification leaves us unable to track such statistics on a uniform, nationwide level…
Read the entire article here.