As a senior in high school, my first semester has been filled with whispers about college acceptance rates, ACT scores, and Affirmative Action. As a senior who identifies as Latinx in a test-in Chicago Public High School where most kids are considering four-year colleges and most kids are white, I’m not only encouraged, but expected to go to a highly selective college.
To help settle the nerves that accompany college applications, the most common thing I hear is “You’re Mexican and a girl, it shouldn’t be hard for you to get into college.” While people usually mean well, they’re also wrong about their assumptions. By identifying as a Latina, I am hit with a double jeopardy, being a woman and an ethnic minority in the US.
What many people don’t know is that as of 2015, private universities are exempt from the ban of sex discrimination by Title IX, keeping the ratio of men to women on campus about one to one since colleges are seeing a ratio of 60:40, in favor of women, in applications. This is why public colleges, who do abide by Title IX, have an increased ratio of women.
While the percentage of minorities going into higher education has increased, most tend to go into community colleges, two-year institutions, and for-profit and online education. 30% of black and Hispanic students with a GPA of at least 3.5 will go into one of those higher education paths, compared to 22% of their white counterparts with the same GPA. Highly selective colleges notoriously look to fill niches made up of academic interests, extra curricular, religion, et cetera. It is interesting to note that race and gender are also some of the niches that colleges aim to fill.
Considering that Harvard, one of the most elite schools in the country, has kept their percentage of Latinx students between 10 and 13 percent in the classes of 2017 and 2020, it has become clear that I am not applying to be a student in college, but a Latina student in college. So, it is not fair to compare the likelihood of acceptance across racial, gender, and ethnic lines, especially since, according to Harvard’s Class of 2017, I am applying to be one of 11.8% of the student body on campus, while a white person is applying to be one of 48.6%.
It is not fair to claim that minorities have it “easier” than white people when it comes to college acceptances, because statistics say otherwise. So when you, as a white person, are talking to your friend, who happens to be a person of color, do not compare yourself to them; not to save your peace of mind but because by comparing yourselves, you belittle not only how hard they’ve worked on their applications, but the fact that it is statistically harder for them, a person of color, to get to the position to even be able to apply to college.
