Giving Compass' Take:

• A recent racial-discrimination lawsuit against Harvard (contending that the school's practices harm minority applicants, specifically Asian Americans) puts the whole college application process in the spotlight: Is it truly equitable?

• As this article explores, how much does racial identity come into play in admissions? What can those in the higher education sector do to make sure there is more transparency?

• Here's something else we need to delve into: racial disparities among college faculty. 

Samantha, 20, who asked to be identified by her first name only so she could speak freely about a sensitive topic, is now a sophomore at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, some 500 miles east of her suburban Cincinnati home. A Korean American who graduated from a predominantly white, affluent private high school, she’s double-majoring in international relations and East Asian studies. The century-old Baltimore campus is gradually becoming home. But the way she got there still makes her uncomfortable. “I got a very high SAT score,” Samantha says, “literally because my parents hired somebody.”

The college-admissions process, especially for highly selective, elite schools, incentivizes students to distort their identities to fit the profile they think the people reviewing their applications will find appealing. This dynamic becomes particularly problematic when it involves a student’s racial identity, whether that means over- or under-emphasizing this background in an effort to seem more appealing to diversity-minded admissions officers. And that process is susceptible to subterfuge by privileged people like Samantha and her parents who can afford to hire consultants to help them game the system.

Some of the application-juicing services are unobjectionable — basic study help and practice interviews, for example. And Samantha, who’d already started to feel disillusioned with the admissions system by the time she’d embarked on the process, didn't lie about herself in her applications. But sometimes in an effort to pour their personalities into a college-friendly mold, students encounter more sinister pressures. From the get-go, Samantha says her tutor and college counselors (all of whom were white) encouraged her not to sound “too Asian” in her application. She took their advice, opting not to write about her violin-playing given the racial stereotypes about such instruments, and scrapping one essay she’d written about being an Asian in the mostly white equestrian world.

Read the full article on racial discrimination and the college admissions process by Alia Wong at The Atlantic.