Apparently their gaydar is working, because LGBT admissions to Penn have seen a marked rise.

Greg Piper at The College Fix has the story:

Penn practices its gaydar in reading student applications

The Daily Pennsylvanian has one of the creepier articles I’ve seen on college applications: Admissions officials are actively trying to guess who is gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender or “ally” (think Alec Baldwin) based on their applications.

It’s not clear why – Penn can’t legally use a quota system to reach a certain number of non-heterosexuals with or without their birth genitals intact – but it sounds like the school has a pretty developed system:

Jordan Pascucci, Office of Admissions Associate Dean of Recruitment, specifically trains admissions staff on how to “read” LGBTQ applicants’ applications. Unlike ethnicity, the Common App does not have a section to specify an applicant’s sexual orientation. …

Bob Schoenberg , the director of the LGBT center, said that he wants admissions officers also to be aware of more subtle indications of LGBTQ identity in applications. “We realized that there must be applicants who are self-identifying in some ways that we weren’t noticing,” he said. “It is not always as explicit as saying ‘I’m gay.’”

As a private school, Penn’s internal admissions notes probably aren’t accessible under state or federal open-records law, but it’s still worth The Daily asking for records showing what exactly admissions officers consider “gay” and how that affects applicants’ chances. (Statements like “I won a decorating award” or “At this flannel party I hosted”? Maybe “I fooled around with my bro and it wasn’t as weird as I thought it would be”?)