December 25, 2007
Posted by Sam Jackson
DNA testing in College Admissions: A Little Affirmative Action talk for Christmas
Should you worry about the collaboration between DNA test marketers and anxious students and parents eager to get their way into top schools? David over at EphBlog certainly thinks so (EphBlog is an unofficial Williams community blog which I mention here frequently as an excellent example of an unofficial school blog that adds lots of value and is a great resource even for prospective students).
There are many "chances" posts on College Confidential, requests from potential applicants for comments on their chances of getting into Williams and advice on how to do so. See here, here and here for recent examples. I am often tempted to reply: "Take a genetic genealogy test and, if it comes back black, join the appropriate clubs in your high school and check the right box on the Common Application."
Good advice?
I don't necessarily want to spark an affirmative action debate here as happened last year on the blog with my writings on Jian Li. What I do find interesting are the questions posed by these new technologies. As a biracial student I am particularly interested in points 4 and 5 about Williams.
4) Besides studying the trends in the number of applicants from different groups, the Record could have a lot of fun just by looking at the pictures of Williams students. There are, allegedly, 49 or so African-Americans in the class of 2011. Want to bet? I have no doubt that the admissions office is being honest --- 49 students did indeed check that box. But, could an outsider look at pictures of all the members of the class of 2011 and pick out those 49 individuals? I doubt it. The Record ought to give it a try. Background information here.
5) Don't forget that there are some administrators at the College who would actually welcome this development. The College loves to be able to claim that 10% of Williams is African-American, whatever the underlying "truth" might be. In this dimension, the College certainly practices a Don't Ask, Don't Tell philosophy. Even better would be having a 10% African-American class with average SAT scores above 1400. Not hard to do if a lot of applicants start checking that box.
I know that I would frequently be surprised to hear that "such and such is [insert minority here], actually" in the context of high school college admissions gossip. Sometimes this was something which would definitely have affected that person's life experience and background and was very relevant to who they were and their family; other times, it was surprising as well as implausible just because the link could be so tenuous.
When there are DNA test marketers who are happy to give results which will tell people they are "black" and college admissions folks happy to accept those students (see point 5) statistics take on an especially distorted relation with reality... just wanted to poll you readers and see what you all thought of this.
Also, merry Christmas and happy new year!
I'm currently a rising senior at Yale University and I've been blogging about college admissions and higher education marketing trends since I began my college application process in 2005. I now also write about my experience here at Yale.
3 Comments
December 26, 2007
hi sam! i am not a regular reader of this blog, but i will offer my two cents on what i have learned about college admissions (not pertaining solely to affirmative action). these days there are so many overqualified students that find so many ways to make themselves look amazing on paper that you really have to use whatever edge you can. although i know that i am an intelligent student that could do well at any college, i have zero confidence that i would have gotten in early had i not been recruited. it sucks for other people who got rejected that i could do that, just as it sucks for white people when (sometimes) less qualified minorities use their race as leverage...but you really have to use what you can to get into college. the college process is very arbitrary--and it is a sad reality sometimes!
merry christmas
December 26, 2007
Recruited athletes have the biggest advantage of anything--better than being a legacy, minority, rich, etc. So yeah, it's handy. The thing is, in this instance any legitimate goals of affirmative action would be totally undermined by someone looking for some tenuous tie to then misrepresent their heritage; it's sad that even now things get distorted more towards people like me (distinctly NOT inner city black youth, kind of thing) but to shift it another degree or two of separation really starts to make things ridiculous.
hope you got good presents!! and see you soon in NY : )
January 5, 2008
Not gonna happen. It sounds to me like this is an issue of insufficient minority recruitment and resentment more than affirmative action flaws. Affirmative action is a socio-political program, and is no more flawed than any of the other socio-political admissions practices it was designed to counteract. In fact, it benefits more white women than any other minority (Women were only admitted to Yale in the 1969, after the civil rights protests and constitutional amendments). We're too quick to forget about that.
Besides, race isn't like blood types -- there isn't any distinct marker in anyone's genes to indicate racial origin, anyway. They use less than 1% of genetic data to guess where genes originated, and use that origin to predict race. But a black person could still have genetic characteristics more often associated with white people. A very slippery slope.
Happy New Year (belated).
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