Race is really easy to game, nobody will actually verify your ethnicity.

Race can and is absolutely gamed all the time. Case in point: Senator Elizabeth Warren.

Just because it can be gamed doesn’t mean it’s not a good metric

Yes, but it’s harder to game. Income is vastly more fluid than racial identity, especially since in this situation it’s more advantageous for your income to go down.

Income and wealth are better predictors of “privilege” than race though.

So one is using a worse indicator.

Using a mix of income and wealth over several years to me is an appropriate indicator and cannot be easily gamed.

The fact that Will Smiths kids get a better chance to get into college than a similar applicant from a first generation immigrant family from Vietnam shows how broken race as an indicator can be.

That’s probably fair, though even rich black people have to deal with discrimination that rich white people don’t.

How is income vastly more fluid than a “racial identity” checkbox on a form? At least it’s sort of possible to verify.

It’s easy to lie and claim to be black, nobody will perform tests on you to verify this. You can be the whitest person in the world and get away with this (so many do).

A lot of financial aid is income based. Is there evidence of families doing this currently?

Anecdotal, but absolutely. I knew several people in undergrad whose parents did things like put assets into trust funds that would have been invisible to the limited means that colleges have at their disposal to audit. One friend specifically told me how his parents transferred ownership of their house to a blind trust they had established under a family member’s name and “rented” it back. This put their total assets well under the total amount to qualify for (a surprising amount of) financial aid. I’ve also heard of parents deferring a portion of their income for the four years their kid was in school, and receiving the deferred income in the years after their kid graduated.

Top schools these days give substantial financial aid to families whose incomes are well into the six figures (and assets into the seven figures), so it makes total sense that families just above the cutoff would use some dirty tricks to qualify.