In a nod to America’s growing multiracial population, the U.S. Department of Education endorsed earlier this week a new system that would allow students to pick more than one “race” box on college applications — and in doing so has unleashed new questions that could have serious policy ramifications.
After nine years of work, the Education Department released draft guidelines intended to help colleges collect and report information on race and ethnicity, and have asked colleges to send feedback. The colleges, which have long struggled with how to classify mixed-race students, overwhelmingly welcomed the guidelines.
“I expect colleges to be pleased because the guidelines certainly are appropriate, reasonable and do limit the burden on categorizing,” says Eugene Anderson, associate director of national initiatives at the American Council on Education. “They make sense; they respect peoples’ individual notion of racial identity, which is important.”
The new system would allow students who identify themselves by more than one race to check more than one box. Those students will be reported as “multiracial,” and the Department of Education will not require colleges to detail their racial combination, as the U.S. Census does.
The group “Asian and Pacific Islander” will be separated into two categories. Hispanic and Latin students will be asked to first identify themselves as Hispanic or Latin, and then given the opportunity to check a second box specifying whether they are Black, Caucasian or other.
Education Department officials acknowledge that many more concerns will inevitably arise in this complex, and often political, issue. For example, will the system result in the apparent decline of some demographic groups? Will colleges aiming for a certain student quota be confused by the anonymous ‘multirace’ category? And is the United States nearing the point where children are so ethnically mixed that race — and the connotations attached to it — has become complicated to the point of irrelevancy?
“When you say out, of 17 million college students, 5 percent are multiracial — well what are they? You don’t know where the new people are from,” Anderson says. “It gets tricky.”
