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Last week Senators Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon) and Jamaal Bowman (D-NY) introduced legislation that would prohibit colleges from considering legacy status in the admissions process (if they participate in the federal student aid program - which almost every college does). Last year, we wrote about Colorado enacting this same kind of law at state schools, but this takes that thinking to a new level. The timing of the announcement seems meant to coincide with the decision by the now right-leaning Supreme Court to take up the issue of affirmative action in college admissions. Our guess is that the senators were sending a message: if you are going to ban affirmative action, which helps minority applicants, then we’re going to ban legacy admissions, which have historically benefited white applicants (at Harvard, 70% of legacy admits are white vs. 40% of the school in total).
There are far more pervasive preferences in the college admissions process
The general public roundly hates legacy preference, so this is not a risky move for Congress. But we believe that the rage against legacy preference is largely illogical. Legacy may be one form of privilege but there are other more pervasive ones that affect the makeup of any given college class more than legacy. Let’s make a case for at least a neutral position on legacy at highly selective colleges:
The biggest problem with hating on legacy preference is that most legacies admitted to any given highly selective school are academically qualified to attend that school. It’s like hating high-quality students whose parents just also happened to attend that college. Should those kids not be able to attend based on that reason? What is the difference between taking a spot at their parent’s college vs. taking a spot at some other college? Those who denounce legacy admissions must believe that these kids are underqualified, but that is typically untrue. Now, can legacies have a leg up when they also make huge donations? Yes, but that is about money, not legacy status. It’s important to separate the two, which is something the Senators did not do, mistakenly referring to the size of a legacy’s bank account. Big money donations are not synonymous with legacy and we know plenty of non-legacies who have made big donations to top colleges for preference in the admissions process.
We’ve often lamented that college is where the buck seems to stop when it comes to privilege. That somehow the lifetime of privilege that some students enjoy over others needs to be rectified by colleges and colleges alone, when really the playing field became unlevel long before. At Stanford, 16% of students are legacies. But 27% of kids are from private high schools (compared to 10% of the total population). And if you consider that most International students also went to private high schools, the share of private school kids at Stanford is probably more like 40%. Is going to a private high school, not a privilege? Why not do away with that preference? The same argument could be made for growing up in certain zip codes, having had access to tutors, or having been given the opportunity to travel for sports or other competitions. The list of privileges that gets preferenced in admissions goes way beyond legacy.
Some argue that doing away with legacy preference increases school diversity. This might be true, but only if the school decided that it would give preference to some other attribute (like being first-generation or an underrepresented minority) in its place. Colleges like Johns Hopkins, who claim diversity increased after eliminating legacy preference could have decided to give more spots to diverse kids anyway. It’s not like, prior to the chance, all of their white kids were legacies. In a system of holistic admissions, where there are far too many qualified students who have applied for places in the class, there are always going to be college preferences. When a college gets more applications from every possible group of people, then it can prioritize those preferences accordingly. This is already being done with affirmative action and we agree with it. The context of a student’s accomplishments is extremely important and the struggles a student has faced by being first-gen or a minority are real and should be considered.
Legacy admissions, unlike affirmative action, may not be worth fighting for in the long term (we don’t feel a strong preference for legacy admission but we do for affirmative action). But we also don’t think it is the boogeyman of college admissions. There are far more pervasive privileges in the admissions process, like well-funded private schools and large donations, that might be a more appropriate target for lawmakers.
