Bryan Lee, a senior at the University of California, Irvine, has noticed that some of his classmates adamantly declare their multiracial heritage while others choose not to identify themselves as being any particular ethnicity.
The half-Korean, half-White biomedical engineering major is co-president of the university’s Mixed Students Organization and says many of the group’s members “absolutely refuse to check any box when they’re filling out forms that ask you to describe your race.” Lee himself has occasionally checked the “other” box in the list of racial identifiers.
It’s an exercise in choice that is driving a gradual but steady uptick in the “race unknown” category of enrollment stats at some colleges and universities. The shift results, in part, from a continuing rise in the number of interracial couples and the children born to those unions. But observers say it also hints at efforts by some current college students to be less fixated on skin color.
“They are the change,” says Arlene Cash, vice president for enrollment management at Spelman College in Atlanta. “They have a very different way of looking at themselves and a much more global perspective of who they are. Many students of mixed races do not want to be pigeon-holed.”
Spelman, for example, listed 16 students of unspecified race in its 2009-2010 freshman class of 567 students. The number of incoming freshmen was roughly identical to the numbers in 2007-2008 and 2008-2009, yet only five incoming students in those previous years did not specify a race. Nationwide, however, the total of “race unknown” students rose from roughly 1.2 million in fall 2004 to roughly 1.6 million in fall 2008, the latest year for which such statistics are available from the National Center for Education Statistics. College administrators say it is too early to draw conclusions about the long-term impact of the trend, calling the changes small and incremental. However, in time observers suspect the trend may begin to alter how schools measure the achievement gap among students who have conventionally been classified strictly as a single race.
Category Confusion
At Long Island University’s Brooklyn, New York, campus, about a quarter of the nearly 11,000 students in fall 2009, and a fifth of them in fall 2010, did not disclose their race. “The question in my mind, as a researcher, is why they do or don’t respond,” says Richard Sunday, the university’s senior associate dean of admissions. “Is it a matter of how we’re collecting the data?”
