More than a third of white students lie about their race on college applications | Hacker News Reader

More than a third of white students lie about their race on college applications

thehill.com

25 points1cvmask37 comments

Many white students lied about their race to improve chances of admission - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29011965 - Oct 2021 (182 comments)

I do not really understand this (I am not American): since race is declarative over there (and a formal thing at all), why someone would be accused to "lie" about their race?

I am white, blond with blue eyes but if saying that I am black gives me preferential treatment, I am certainly black.

Using stupid processes leads to stupid (and expected) behaviour.

Assume you apply for college at an Ivy League. Or a SWE job. Or a faculty position. Or for SMB grants. At some point you'll meet the hiring manager / committee face2face. The animus against your skin color will kick in regardless of the box you filled on the application.

Small tangent, but if I type "animus" into Google the first hit is a photo of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I can't decide if that's a coincidence or not.

Probably your personalization. I see no such image on a fresh incognito session.

If this is how it works, it is truly a horrible discrimination.

I thought that you check a box on an application and it gives you bonus points. If it is an individual that assesses your racial status then it is bad.

People who have ancestors with a specific race but do not show the proper external signs are doomed.

This is so fucked up that I cannot imagine how it can work if someone decides you are "enough Asian" to not think you are using the system.

We are talking in France to anonimize as much as possible the applications to avoid bias, and have someone who may be racist (or in love with your race) to decide on your fate. This is because we have the opposite problem: if your origins show up too early you may be discriminated more easily.

I'm not making any claims of which race gets penalized, only remarking that it's difficult to effectively lie about race.

If we were to listen carefully to refugees from Lebanon / Syria civil wars, we may learn that the trajectory of an identitarian system is an acerbically contested tug of war between identity groups ever spiralling into violence. At the end of WW1 the Austro-Hungarian Empire broke down along ethnic identity lines for a reason.

Race appartenance in the US is self-declarative. You are what you say you are, there is no "measurement of race match".

Seriously speaking, the point of using identity markers as admission criterion not to be fair or coherent. Good luck telling the hiring manager that race is self-declarative after they rejected you without disclosing the motives.

Yes, and this is why I do not understand why this exists in the first place.

Either you tick a mark and you get extra points, no questions asked - or you are subject to someone's appreciation and it does not matter if there are points or not because that person would have been positive or negative to your origins anyway.

If you go for subjective - there is planty of that anyway everywhere in the world (and as you said, good luck proving that you were discriminated)

One of the points is to create social coordination. I know that you know that everybody knows that there are too many / too few Xs in this institution, keep that in mind when the next X shows up at the door with an application in their hand.

This even turns into a linguistic battle of sorts, see, e.g. "How the Asians became white" https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...

This is the case everywhere in the world. Then when X comes, the jury/hiring manager/... look at them, their skin color, sex, social provenance, name and, in their minds, know that X is supposed to be given less or more weight.

There is no need to have "race" in a form for this discrimination to work, it is as you said an informal message. Or a formal one, but then one has to play the game and add extra formal points to the applicant.

If they do not play the game, we are back to the informal, subjective discrimination I mentioned at the beginning.

EDIT: your link in a nice example of the craziness, indeed.

One of the hardest things to internalize in life for someone possibly on the spectrum (look what site we are having this conversation on) is that people don't care what is right, they care what other people think it's right. Nobody got fired for buying IBM and all that.

This whole identity politics leads to circular results via games theory strategies:

- If I cannot question someone gender because its bigotry/discrimination etc

- then you cannot question race that I identify as

- and I can identify as any race that is treated preferentially

I identify as X, and if you dare to question it during the interview I will sue for discrimination.

In the end we end up with a layer of bureaucratic song and dance where everyone will identify as X race and Y gender and no one can say anything about the absurdity.

Its The Emperor's New Clothes where everyone is forced not to shout 'The king is naked'

Oh, we are such a bunch of over-rationalizing social unfits. The way things work in practice is more akin to the small kids in this adorable video: https://twitter.com/Kolamide/status/1453655850447515648

Good luck having them admit they flunked you because of your race. You were just insufficiently qualified for that specific position and a poor fit at the moment.

Some of those reading this may find it shocking or humorous - but in the real world people encounter discrimination and there are no boxes to check to flip one’s appearance, accent or name

I rationally detest reverse discrimination as much as anyone

But I see the situation colleges are in: they are last in line in an unjust system.

60 years ago black kids couldn’t go to some white schools ffs

At admission time colleges can’t do anything about an applicants upbringing, immigration status, nutrition, Or the countries racial injustices, redlining, etc

The problem comes down to this: it’s easy to discover reverse discrimination because it is explicitly written down in admission policy

It’s hard to rail against pervasive institutional discrimination because it is hidden away in personal biases

Anectdata: as an immigrant from a developing country I have found the US incredibly welcoming. I’m white with blue eyes, you’d never think I was an immigrant.

One time when responding to a craigslist ad for a rental the other person hung up on me when hearing my foreign name - saying I’d probably thrash the place.

That was the only instance I remember. I can’t say if my name has helped or hindered me in other job or rental applications

>Most students, 48 percent, claimed to be Native American on their application.

I seriously have to wonder...is it possible that some of these applicants are confused about what the term 'Native American' signifies? E.g. confusing being 'from America' instead of a decedent of Indigenous peoples? It could be people taking advantage of the system, but it could also be due to ignorance.

The survey question was "Did you falsely claim to be a racial minority on your college application," so this can only be those who knowingly lied.

Years ago, non-whites used to try to present as white. Latinos, Arabs, some Indians and lighter-skinned blacks would avoid the sun, try to use a white accent, and take white-sounding names. They were seeking advantage, because being seen as white was advantageous.

Today, we see the reverse. Whites try to identify as non-whites wherever they can. They're faking college applications, posting pistures of their skin tone on Twitter to justify their use of dark-skinned emojis, perming their hair to make afros, reverting from white names like Neil to ancestral names like Kamal. As before, they are seeking advantage, because being seen as non-white is advantageous.

And we're angry at them - for arrogating the special privileges of the non-whites.

Is an Egyptian who moves to the US an African American?

What about someone of Dutch heritage whose ancestors lived in Africa for 350 years, and then moves to the US? Can they be called African American? What if they also have Zulu ancestry? Does it depend on what they look like, or does it depend on what percentage is Zulu?

What about someone whose ancestors lived in Jamaica for hundreds of years, ancestry unknown, but dark skinned. If they move to the US and "look" African, can they be considered African American?

Or can you only be called African American if your ancestors include those subject to slavery in the US?

Curious, if race has no scientific basis then how is it possible to lie about one's race? There is no true answer because its all bullshit

> if race has no scientific basis then how is it possible to lie about one's race?

I believe society sees me as X and/or I believe myself to be X. I then intentionally state that I am Y. Given I do not believe that, it is a lie, regardless of what the categories X and Y are based on.

>"I believe society sees me as X and/or I believe myself to be X."

But that's never the question listed. Its always something like "select/list your race" or "race you identify as"

Seventy-seven percent of white applicants who lied about their race on their application were accepted to those colleges.

Hm. What happens if applicants lie about gender?

It is important to compare the 77% with the acceptation rate of white students that didn't lie. Each university accepts a tiny fraction of the applications, but each student usually apply to many of them, so the acceptation ratio is higher.

I wonder where they ever could have gotten the idea that this was okay and they’d suffer no consequences if caught.

> Among those willing to fake their minority status, 48 percent of white male applicants lied about their race, while 16 percent of white female applicants did so.

I suppose male students are likely to have lower grades. From what I can tell, the more egregious cheaters are usually a bit marginal, or right at the top and want to get an edge to do even better, as the big incentives are either to not lose, or to win - people in the middle have a lot less of an incentive.

Men are also more likely to commit other forms of fraud—and crimes more generally. It seems like the simpler explanation is that men are just less likely to follow the rules than women. Note that this can also be a good thing: men were less likely than women to follow instruction in the Milgram experiment.

Outrage aside, if someone A/B'd their college applications, what are the odds of being caught and disqualified? It might make sense to add multiple inferior applications to your own, even pay for 5-10 people to do throwaway applications from your high school to raise your appeal.

9% claimed to be Asian lmao

Given that Europe is technically an Asian peninsula, they are not even wrong.

If anything it's an Eurasian peninsula.

Is it worth lying about your race for job applications too?

In our postmodern world, identity categories are fluid social constructs. Therefore it is impossible to lie about identity markers on a job application. At least in theory. Please adjust your language accordingly.

How dare these individuals subvert well-meant racism? /s

Indeed I find it funny how racism is bad... Except in these select few contrived instances where it's magically okay.

Yeah... No. It's gotten to the point I start asking people why they need to know with questions like that.

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