Redefining Diversity in College Admissions: Beyond the Obvious

I am frequently asked if being a certain race or ethnicity counts as a hook. Even during the era of affirmative action, I always said no.

Why?

Because to colleges, diversity in theory does not mean proportional representation of races and ethnicities on their campuses. Rather, it means multiplicity of lived experiences.

To understand this, let's consider why colleges place so much emphasis in their supplemental essays on diversity and community. The chief mission of most universities, especially research universities, is the production of new knowledge. For new discoveries to be made, existing frameworks need to be questioned. Given any framework, there are always multiple ways to critique it, each potentially leading to a more complete framework.

To generate these differences, it is necessary to have people from a variety of lived experiences, because our perspectives are a product of our experiences. I hope we can all agree that perspectives and ideas are not intrinsically tied to race, but rather to experience.

Unfortunately, one's lived experiences are greatly correlated with one's race or ethnicity due to historical and ongoing systemic oppression of marginalized people. This correlation leads people to confuse lived experiences with race. Many applicants who think that race is a hook fail to detail their lived experiences and the specific perspectives borne from them in their supplemental essays, and instead write only about their identity.

This misunderstanding also impacts admission officers. They might miss the forest for the trees by confusing lived experiences with race, given how strongly race is tied to lived experiences. As I mentioned in a previous article of mine, it is a poor strategy to rely on admission officers going off-script due to some moral convictions that some of them may have. Doing so is akin to gambling. Instead, applicants of any background need to provide very vivid and intimate first-person accounts of their lived experiences. They need to be explicit about how those experiences shaped their perspectives and what exactly those perspectives are. The more specific one can be, the better. It is also vital that applicants don't imply that just because they have a certain identity, they have certain beliefs. Rather, they need to show how their beliefs are rooted in their experiences.