Shades of Grey

The Common Application is a standard form used by 225 selective colleges and universities in the United States, including Harvard. On its first page, right underneath the space for applicants’ names and ages, is a boxed-off set of questions that the form describes as strictly optional. They are questions that concern applicants’ places of birth, their mother tongues, and, most notably, their ethnic groups: pigeonholes that allow colleges to select their entering classes with an eye to diversity and minority representation.

Before I applied to college, I don’t recall ever being asked to self-identify as a member of an ethnic or racial group. So when I was confronted with the question on my Harvard application, I panicked. Would my answer shape my chances with the admissions office? Might I be condemned as “just another bright white kid?” Would I finally be made to pay for a lifetime of privilege and luxury? I had long been acquainted with the concept of “affirmative action,” but now here it was, staring me in the face for the very first time.

Ultimately, I left the question unanswered.

In “The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admissions,” former Princeton President William G. Bowen and former Harvard President Derek C. Bok describe the “broad aims of the admissions process” as including, “the need to assemble a class of students with a wide diversity of backgrounds, experiences, and talents.” They argue, further, that such diversity is beneficial to their student populations, and to society in general: the authors cite evidence that, between the 1976 and the 1989 college entering cohorts, there was a 15-to-20 percent increase in the number of matriculants who rated college as contributing “a great deal” to their “ability to work effectively and get along well with people of different races/cultures,” and their “ability to have a good rapport with people holding different beliefs.”

What is important to note in Bowen and Bok’s argument in their choice of vocabulary. The idea isn’t to assemble an entering class with a variety of racial identities, but rather with “a wide diversity of backgrounds, experiences, and talents.” The first two of these three characteristics are certainly shaped by race, but they are not encapsulated by it. Rather, it’s an applicant’s background—in the broadest sense—with which the admissions process ought to be concerned.

By contrast, the kind of diversity toward which the current check-the-box regime is oriented is profoundly superficial. Its end result is not a truly diverse student body but a colorful one. If it’s the former that is most beneficial to a campus environment and to society in the long run, then the way college admissions offices take account of diversity among their applicants has to change.

But how? First, eliminate the race/ethnicity box at the bottom of the first page of the Common Application. Even though it’s presently optional, the inclusion of such a raw barometer of an applicant’s background on the application implicitly emphasizes those of his or her characteristics that are least important to creating a diverse student body, in the grand scheme of things. It isn’t enough for colleges to claim that applicants’ responses comprise “just another piece of information”; so long as universities proudly publish their minority matriculation figures each year, this black-and-white indicator of identity will undermine efforts at creating real diversity.

To replace the superficial race question, college admissions officers should pay closer attention to applicants’ personal statements and letters of reference, whose purpose is to give the kind of insight well suited for making judgments about diversity. By now it is conventional wisdom that colleges seek diversity when making admissions decisions, so we can hope that applicants will see it in their own best interest to be forthcoming about their unique backgrounds and experiences in their applications.

It is extremely important that colleges and universities continue to seek diverse student bodies through their admissions processes. Under the present system, however, a simple yes-or-no question about racial identity can only produce a simplistic understanding of diversity. If colleges are to build entering classes that represent a variety of individuals—and not simply a variety of minority groups—they will have to start by renovating the process by which they choose their students. The checked box must go.



Adam Goldenberg ’08 is a social studies concentrator in Winthrop House. His column appears on alternate Fridays.