Multiracial students and the evolution of affirmative actionPosted in Articles, Campus Life, Law, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2011-06-21 03:29Z by Steven |
Multiracial students and the evolution of affirmative action
Harvard Law & Policy Review
2011-06-17
Reduced to its elements, affirmative action is a relatively straightforward concept. Colleges and universities consider an applicant’s racial and ethnic background to ensure that they enroll sufficient numbers of students from traditionally underrepresented groups. But schools are now grappling with new Department of Education regulations that, for the first time, allow students to identify themselves as members of two (or more) ethnic groups on their college and graduate school applications. The initiative was intended to recognize the diversity of the national student body and to ensure that no student had to pigeonhole him or herself into one neatly checked box. But the multitude of boxes suddenly available to each applicant introduces an unwelcome element of uncertainty for campus officials composing the incoming class of 2015.
Say a mixed-race student self-identifies as both African-American and white on his college application; the former group traditionally receives preferential treatment in affirmative action programs, while the latter does not. Under the new reporting guidelines, how should the student be counted in terms of his contribution to the school’s diversity? Is he African-American, and if so, does he somehow count less when calculating these statistics than does someone with two African-American parents? Is he white, and if so, is he less white such that he counts less toward the school’s burgeoning white population? Is there some formula by which the school could count him as both? Or is he a member of neither category such that he and other multiracial students must be reclassified altogether?…
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