CVK

There’s a good article on UC Berkeley’s NewsCenter that explores what it’s like to be a mixed student at that school, where 22.9% of undergrads self-identified as mixed in a 2004 survey. (Across the UC system, the average was 25.8 percent. ) The article details the divergent experiences of four students, but also does a good job of looking at the bigger picture surrounding mixed race identity in this country. Here is a snapshot of the survey results:

Berkeley freshmen combinations

On the 2004 Survey of New Freshmen, Berkeley’s Office of Student Research asked respondents for the fist time to indicate their ethnic identifications from up to three lists of 27 categories, including three subcategories for “White” (United States, Eastern European, and Middle Eastern) and seven for “Latino.”

Of the 2,315 responses, 87 percent indicated a single ethnicity, 11.2 percent listed two, and 1.8 percent listed three. The following 10 combinations account for half of all Berkeley freshmen’s multi-ethnic combinations*:

White (U.S.) + Chinese 8.1%
White (U.S.) + Japanese 7.1%
White (E.E.) + White (U.S.) 6.7%
Vietnamese + Chinese 5.7%
Japanese+ Chinese 5.4%
White (U .S.) + Chicano 4%
White (U.S.) + Amer. Indian 3.7%
White (M.E.) + White (U.S.) 3.7%
Other Asian + Chinese 3%
White (U.S.) + Filipino 3%