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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

Seeing that it is optional to report your ethnicity, I'm kind of surprised that anyone (other than those who get an advantage) would do so. The admissions system is already arbitrary as hell.

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If your last name is Asian then would omitting your ethnicity gain you anything? I would doubt it.

I’ll admit that I know nothing about the college admissions procedures as far as the selection process, but it seems to me that applicants should only be known by an arbitrary ID number. That is, admissions committees simply shouldn’t have access to this sort of (possibly discriminatory) information. Name, ethnicity, etc.

Why not just hide it from them? I suppose there are certain parts of an application which could give away information that’s meant to be hidden—being president of the Asian-American Student Club would pretty well give away the applicant’s ethnicity.

> but it seems to me that applicants should only be known by an arbitrary ID number.

And then there's the whole "legacy admit" thing.

Thanks. Haven't heard about [legacy admit](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_preferences) before - That's some serious nepotism at play.

I too am no expert, but isn't discrimination on the basis of skin colour a 'feature' of the selection process? The novel thing here is that non-white students are not being discriminated in favour of for a change. Anonymising would prevent universities from discriminating on grounds of skin colour and could as a result get them into trouble with the government.

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