A new racial category
The White House has proposed adding a new federal racial category for people whose ancestors came from the Middle East or North Africa. This policy could help college applicants of those ethnicities get in, if the Supreme Court does not strike down race-based affirmative action.
I expect that if the federal government establishes this new ethnic category, colleges would also start using it for their ethnic admission quotas. Colleges must use the federal government’s racial classification when they report their enrollment to the Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, even if they use their own internal system too.
Today, students of Middle Eastern heritage register as plain old white when applying to college and so are competing with the kids whose families came on the Mayflower, through Ellis Island, or from Romania last year.
How finely to slice things?
I’m sympathetic to this change, maybe because I have a lot of friends of Middle Eastern descent. Isn’t it manifestly silly that when the US-born children of Syrian refugees apply to college, they would be classed with Daughters of the American Revolution for affirmative-action accounting purposes?
But adding one category invites the question of whether more categories should be added too. It is also absurd that Afghan- and Korean-Americans both get lumped into the “Asian” category.
I also wonder what ethnicities will count as Middle Eastern. Armenians, Azeris, Georgians, Circassians? Askhenazi Israelis? Greek Cypriots? This gal? What to do about the population swaps between Greece and Turkey in the 1920s?
I’m glad I don’t work for the Census.
A smaller pool
In a world with a an affirmative-action category for people of Middle Eastern descent, those applicants would be competing with each other. Since that pool is a smaller pool than that of white people broadly, the change would improve their chances.
As I’ve written before, elite colleges do impose rough racial quotas, though they claim not to. Because colleges are aiming to enroll some number of kids of each race, applicants of each race are competing with each other, not with the entire applicant pool. For example, Latino kids are competing with each other for the slots allocated for Latinos. Same goes for bassoon players or aspiring chemists, if those are slots the college wants to fill.
How much of a boost might applicants in this new ethnic category get?
What will the quota be?
That depends on the gap between the number of kids of Middle Eastern descent schools want and how many qualified kids apply. The bigger that gap, the more of a leg-up these applicants will have, compared to the broader applicant pool. In the Harvard litigation that was just at the Supreme Court, the plaintiffs’ expert witness performed regressions that showed how much weight each racial category carried in determining admissions outcomes.
I don’t know what the Middle Eastern quotas will be. Here’s one possibility for how that number will get established: one or a few elite schools will choose a number, somewhat arbitrarily. They’ll aim to balance appearing DEI-concerned while maintaining legacy, athlete, and full-pay enrollment and the rough proportions of their existing ethnic quotas. Then other schools will converge to a similar distribution.
At whose expense?
If colleges don’t increase their class sizes, and they include a new ethnic quota to fill, then they’ll have to nibble away at the other ethnic quotas to make some room. Who will get nibbled? The most surreptitious places are in the “unknown” or “two or more races” categories.
Whither affirmative action?
I don’t think anyone knows what affirmative action will look like after the Supreme Court rules on the Students for Fair Admission cases against Harvard and UNC. It seems likely that race-based affirmative action, as practiced today, will go away. But we don’t know if:
Class-based affirmative action will be allowed
Colleges will find workarounds that get them to similar outcomes
Admissions officers will, through unconscious inertia, keep making similar decisions
Some state governments will prove lax in enforcing the SCOTUS decision
More lawsuits will spring up
So there’s a broader uncertainty here, beyond the question about Middle Eastern heritage.
So, what to do about reporting your child’s ethnicity? One free piece of advice is that it’s important to be consistent. Don’t list one answer on a standardized test and another on the Common App. To discuss an approach for your child in more detail, you can book a one-on-one session here. We can also discuss much more important elements of the application, like coursework and standardized tests.
I look forward to working with your family!
