So, people filling out applications next year may notice that the race/ethnicity question has changed. We are required to report statistics back to the Federal government about the racial/ethnic background of our students (based upon information volunteered by those students in their application). IPEDs had 6 categories people could select for their race/ethnicity - White, African-American, Asian-American, Hispanic American, Native American, and Other. (There is of course the seventh option which is to decide to not fill it out). Plenty of people select other, since frankly, what are you supposed to do if you fall into more than one category?
So IPEDS rolled out new categories which are getting incorporated into new applications (on both the graduate and undergraduate side - it's a national thing so you'll see it in pretty much any school you apply to). There are, in fact, two questions: Are you Hispanic/Latino and (regardless of answer to first question) Which of the following describe you - select all that apply: Caucasian, African-American, Asian-American, Native American, Pacific Islander. I like this, as it allows people to be much more descriptive and doesn't force people into a single category.
This has, of course, brought up questions from people about how to identify themselves. In the end, the answer is of course, "how ever you choose to identify yourself." We don't check to see that you really are whatever you said you were, and the results aren't used in any kind of admission or financial aid decisions so it really doesn't matter to the university so much if you click off every check box on the list.
So small scale - it doesn't matter. What I find is that it does matter in the macro sense - while theoretically students of any and all races should probably attend school in the same proportions as they exist in the population, this is manifestly NOT the case. Of students volunteering the information, Caucasian students attend higher ed in far greater numbers than would be reasonable for simply their proportion of the population (Looking at the National Center for Education Statistics database, it looks like "white" students make up 60% of total college enrollment). Now, to be clear, college attendance is not nearly as correlated with race as it is on income (for a whole lot of reasons - access to better school resources, ability to pay tuition, access to tutoring and other extra-curricular ed resources, time to study as opposed to work during secondary education, ability to take time to attend college as opposed to working immediately after secondary education, parental education level, - all kinds of things), and in the US income/economic class and race have a suspicious relationship.
While race isn't a factor for most schools' admissions processes, it does point to a non-random disparity between races that, because of the effects of higher ed upon lifetime earnings (though admittedly, there is some disparity in how much of an effect there is) is likely to only continue. If parents' education is correlated to post-secondary education, and post-secondary education is positively correlated with lifetime income (in plain terms - your chances of going to college are better if your parents went, and if you go to school you'll make more, lifetime-wise, than you would if you didn't), the cycle of NOT attending college is equally vicious.
And so, at a public policy level, we look at race - it tells policy makers that there's a problem. On the school level, we pay attention to it when we look at the profile of our enrollment - more in the interest of trying to provide an environment of diversity of experience that is ideally part of education than anything else.
Does the new IPEDS reporting help us in those macro ends any better? I think so. More accurate information is (almost always) better than less accurate information. It reflects the more complicated reality of people's ethnicity than the old system. And I'm glad that it remains a completely optional thing to self-identify, even if the answers are important in the aggregate.
