A new education research report, “Unknown” Students on College Campuses, examines applications data collected from three private colleges in California between 1991 and 2001. The study reveals a trend where some White students claimed their Race was “Unknown” in order to trick the applications process into believing they were minority students.
The result of the applications manipulation was colleges believed they were enrolling more minority students than their applicants led them to believe. Data provided to the federal government indicated a rise from 3.2 percent to 5.9 percent in “Unknown” racial identification on applications.
At one college, students who re-classified their racial identity from “Unknown” to “White” rose to 70 percent post-admission from 42 percent pre-admission. The overall percentage of students in the study who claimed their Race was “Unknown” plunged from 32 percent to 4 percent after admission.
Historically colleges re-categorize students of “Unknown” Race as “multiracial” but that assumption was skewed by White students who pretended not to know their Race in order to skirt majority admissions limits.
Colleges benefited from this scam as well because they were able to point to large “minority enrollment” numbers to impress true minority students with the expansive “multiracial makeup” of the campus.
Minority students were rightly confused when they enrolled only to discover the claimed minority population never existed. Is this White trickery in the college admissions system the expected result of racial quotas and failed Affirmative Action initiatives or is something meaner going on here?