CVK
Sharlene Brown just wrote an opinion piece for the Harvard Crimson decrying the fact that Harvard University “recategorizes” its mixed students back into just a single box even if they checked more than one race on their applications:

Once a multiracial student gets to Harvard he finds that he’s been shoved back into one box. Upon registering for classes, at least 22 multiracial students found that Harvard had listed them as single-raced. They all clearly remember checking all that apply on their applications, as the common application requested. However, the registration site identified them as belonging to just one racial or ethnic group…

Harvard provides nice and cozy settings for multiracial students to explore their identities with one another, but its cold institutional blindness to the existence of these students indicates that our society has not yet parted with its traditional mindset. A student shouldn’t have to choose whether to deny her father or her mother.

This an issue that many universities are grappling with at the moment but actually it’s not necessarily their fault. The Department of Education was supposed to have introduced new racial/ethnic data collection practices by January 2003–new practices that would allow students to check two or more races–but as of today it still has not done so. As a result, even if a university is forward-thinking enough to allow students to check more than one race on its application, at the end of the day when it submits its data to the DOE, it must recategorize every multiracial student into a single box because that’s what the DOE requires.