It's troubling that the admissions process at many colleges these days often focuses not just on an applicant's academic merit and related qualifications, but also on factors such as race, which should play no role in admissions.
The U.S. Department of Education this past year began requiring colleges and universities to gather more extensive information about the races of applicants for admission. Students have a host of ethnic categories from which to choose when they fill out college applications, and the whole process has become rather absurd.
Here is how The New York Times reported on it:
"The new options have forced colleges to confront thorny questions ... . Is a student applying as [mixed] black and Latino more desirable in terms of diversity than someone who is white and black? Or white and Vietnamese? Should the ethnicities of one's distant relatives be considered fair game, or just parents? And what should be done about students who skip the race question altogether - a sizable number of whom, some studies have shown, are white, and do so either in protest or out of fear that identifying as merely white could hurt rather than help their chances in this new environment?"
Isn't that exactly the kind of racial game-playing that not only colleges but places of employment, too, should be trying to avoid?
Wouldn't it be far more just if decisions on whom to admit to college or whom to hire for a job were based on legitimate academic and professional qualifications, not on ethnicity?
Isn't it past time for all this racial "head counting" to stop?