Who is What?

{Click on image above to clarify. A link to the center document is in footnote [1]}

Author, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and contributing editor to the Atlantic, Shadi Hamid, posted a UC document on Twitter yesterday entitled "Student Ethnicity Collection and Reporting at UC" that describes how race and ethnicity is to be recorded for university purposes.[1] The document is undated and the latest reference on it is 2014, so possibly there is a later version somewhere. It appears to have been developed in response to another document of the U.S. Dept. of Education that spells out rules for reporting.[2]

The UC document has some surprises. Under its standard, the individuals shown above would all be classified as "white" by UC. (The photos are all of individuals who live in the U.S. and were taken from various news sources.) Individuals of European origin - except those from Spain - are also "white." Persons from Spain fall into the Hispanic classification. It appears that Brazilians - who speak Portuguese - would also be reported as Hispanic, although it's not clear where persons from Portugal would be listed. You may find other anomalies. 

It's unclear whether students who self-report are given the detailed classification. But keep it in mind when you see tables such as the one above from UCLA.

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[1] https://twitter.com/shadihamid/status/1317128534868086785 and https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/sites/default/files/Race-Eth%20Data%20Collection.pdf. For Hamid: https://www.brookings.edu/experts/shadi-hamid/.

[2] "Changes to Race/Ethnicity Reporting to IPEDS," available at https://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/report-your-data/race-ethnicity-reporting-changes.