Applying to the University of California, you’re faced with a daunting application filled with pages upon pages of forms asking for everything from high-school grades and standardized test scores to your parents’ income and family size.
But for some students, the portion of the university application concerning racial identity poses a serious personal challenge ‘mdash; specifically, for students of Middle Eastern heritage. Of the application’s 28 officially recognized racial categories, none apply to Middle Eastern students, forcing them to check either ‘white’ ‘mdash; the category under which they have been grouped by the U.S. Census Bureau since 1970 ‘mdash; ‘Asian’ or ‘African,’ depending on their family’s origins. Some students mark ‘other’ or decline to state their racial identity because they feel none of the official groups apply to them.
A coalition of student groups from UCLA is lobbying the university to modify the application to provide an additional category for Middle Eastern students. These students feel that they are not ethnically ‘white’ and being grouped as such is detrimental to the university’s racial statistical data, which is used for outreach and retention efforts across the 10-campus system.
Using momentum from the university’s 2007 decision to include 23 more racial options ‘mdash; led by the Asian Pacific Coalition’s ‘Count Me In’ campaign, which added groups such as Pakistani, Hmong and Samoan ‘mdash; Middle Eastern students now want their concerns addressed, but have faced hurdles as UC administrators consider the costs of adjusting university computer systems to accommodate the request.
Ultimately, however, the benefits of such a change far outweigh the costs. Middle Eastern students are no more culturally white than Chinese are Korean, and leaving them excluded skews valuable statistical data. Especially considering the new admission policy ‘mdash; which de-emphasizes test scores and gives more consideration to personal circumstance and under which white students have been projected to make significant admissions gains ‘mdash; altering the application data to allow a Middle Eastern category could provide a more accurate picture of just exactly who is admitted, offering a greater insight into the university’s true diversity.