There’s an Indian kid (dot not feather) who claimed to be black for both college and medical school who has written about how easy it made his path.
It’s easy - really, too easy - to rag on this enormous thirst among elite colleges for blacks to be admitted. The underlying problem is real, though, and it isn’t going away.
Yes,I recall seeing the article. It made the case that admissions officers put protected classes in the review pool whereas an Asian or person of india origin would be cast aside.
Once the selection pool was formed for review, ethnicity was not really looked at. So it was a way of gaming the system and clearing political hurdles.
I know a guy who moved here some years ago as a teen, a white Jewish immigrant from South Africa.
He says he got his citizenship during his junior year at Tulane. He went to the financial aid office and requested the paperwork for some African-American scholarship they had. Apparently the black admin was not amused as she gave him the forms.
He says he got a full ride his senior year.
Which, though I hate to have to say it, is why you never want to have a black doctor.
IT also relies on what is pretty much self-identification. There's nobody asking for DNA samples from applicants. And as more and more people have mixed-race children. There's going to be a growing number of people who are racially ambiguous. My wife, for example, had no idea that Megan Markle was black and I wouldn't have known myself until I learned it.