Every student who went through finding and
applying for a masters will know how much patience and courage this laborious
process requires. Following each time different instructions, depending on the
university, you spend months worrying about you reference letters, writing your
personal statement and enhancing your resume.
I was in that exact situation this week. After
having spent hours gathering the required documents and informing myself about
the deadlines, I was finally able to see the end of this administrative tunnel.
While I was filling out the long application for one of my masters programme, I
switched to the « Monitoring » section. There, I was asked a series of unexpected
questions. I will not mention the university specifically, but let’s simply say
it is one of the top-UK universities in the field of social sciences.
These questions were at the number of five,
related to my disabilities, my ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation and
gender. It is interesting to note that I was obliged to answer all of them (which
was indicated by the red star in the corner), and I could not possibly skip to
the next section.
To each of them, I was given an exhaustive
choice of options. Every imaginable configuration was proposed. I was, indeed,
impressed by the level of precision: for instance, in terms of ethnicity, it
varied from simply “white” to “Mixed White-Black Caribbean” and even “Asian or
Asian British-Pakistani”. In what regards religion, the spectrum was between
“spiritual” and every possible confession we could imagine. However, if for
some reason you wanted to avoid the question, you could simply choose “prefer not
to say”.
The first thought that came to my mind was “Is
it even your business”? While I can understand the logic behind asking about my
disabilities (that have to be taken into account with the rest of the
information I provided), I can’t get how my sexual orientation or even religion
is related to the point ? After all, it all constitutes my profile, but
does it count as much as my grades or personal statement ?
I started wondering if there should be a right
answer, the one that would guarantee me an offer for that masters. If I put
« prefer not say », I wouldn’t give them any data and preserve my
integrity and privacy. On the other hand, they would be tempted to think that I
have something to hide, and be more skeptical towards my application. At the
same time, I was confused by the actual restrictiveness of the proposed
answers: it talked about the ethnicity you “belong”, not the one you “identify
yourself with” – which are obviously two different things revealing a lot about
your personality. Moreover, the options offered in the question related to
religion were also very mainstream: the most specific option was “Sikhism”.
What if I have two religions, or haven’t made my mind yet? This might result in
an even more discriminatory logic than it was supposed to fight against.
However, I realized the nonsense of this way of
thinking when I read the short paragraph before the questions : it
explained that these answers will not be transmitted to the Admissions office
of the university. They will simply contribute to a global database,
established to monitor the diversity of backgrounds within the student
community. It also mentioned that the university would better target and
evaluate its services based on this information.
Most importantly, it specified that the answers
are also collected by the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA). HESA has
its own website detailing all the possible uses of this collected data : firstly,
it serves for publications about students’ conditions in higher education.
Secondly, it is used for statistics, research and information purposes about
equal opportunities among all the providers.
Several times, it warns you that « your information is provided by
reference to your name but will not be used to make decisions about you ».
In other words, please do not be afraid to submit your personal information in
the most honest of ways, since we can guarantee you that you will not be
identified.
In my opinion, this raises a fundamental
question of protection of our privacy, as there is no way we can make sure of
the full transparency of this organization. The « rights » on our
information only give us a knowledge of which information is used and who has
access to it – we are not free to determine what we want to give up. After having
shared my emotions with my peers at university, I could see that they were as
surprised as me, and found it abnormal to mix an academic application with this
kind of personal data.
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