More than a third of white students lie about their race on college applications

[Dr. Strange]

38. My guess...

they get away with it because the college is in a awkward position. There are two possibilities:

The student would have been admitted anyway, so the lie didn't matter. If the college punishes the student, it will be for lying about race (even if there were no consequences). If this was a public institution, then we get the interesting constitutional question of whether the state can force someone to claim to be a race if that person doesn't want to.

Or the student would not have been admitted if they identified as white, which while acceptable from most of our points of view here, would contradict the narrative of white privilege. And this would set up another constitutional question of whether it's okay to discriminate explicitly on the basis of race, which most colleges tend to want to avoid.