Harvard & UNC lawsuits: LEGACY PREFERENCE

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<p>Wrong. Minor v. Happersett held that the Constitution did not grant women the right to vote. The 19th Amendment was passed by Congress, then ratified by the states. Once the amendment was in place, the Supreme Court upheld it.</p>

<p>Let’s see. Steve Ballmer just endowed 12 computer science professorships. If his children want to go to Harvard, should Harvard let them in? I would say yes, as long as they will not fail out, as universities play the long game. Harvard wants connections to Steve Ballmer’s family and friends, it wants to show its gratitude, and it wants connections to the people most likely to want to build things in the future on university campuses in memory of Steve Ballmer, i.e., his children.</p>

<p>That’s how a university builds a $36 billion endowment. As they cut out hot breakfast and dismissed some staff during the crash of 2008, they don’t seem to think they have enough money.</p>

<p>Jerome Karabel covered legacy admissions in The Chosen. When Yale cut back on legacy admissions in the '60s, the alumni rose in open revolt. I think R. Inslee Clark, the director of admissions at the time, lasted only 4 to 5 years. <a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/13/opinion/13karabel.html[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/13/opinion/13karabel.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>“Only 2 among the 30 don’t have Harvard degrees. One of them is Drew Faust and her daughter went to Harvard. Imagine that. These people decide how the university approaches life and it’s not a stretch to think they might like their family members to have an extra feather on the scale when it comes to admission decisions. Is that right?”</p>

<p>Again, this is a DIFFERENT ARGUMENT. Whether trustees of a university should have “chits” to give away to their children is similar in kind to the development argument, and has nothing to do with plain-vanilla legacies.</p>

<p>As for Periwinkle - I wouldn’t know who Steve Ballmer is if I tripped over him (Microsoft, I guess? beats me) but yeah, I really don’t have problems with significant donors getting a kid or two in. Those donations do a lot of good.</p>

<p>Suppose Elite U decided that it wanted to “super-favor” legacies – as long as they were reasonably academically qualified (not needing to be tippy-top), they got it. So play out what would happen to Elite U’s money, composition, student body experience, loyalty, and reputation. </p>

<p>BTW, does anyone have a list of … what % of the student body at various top colleges is legacy?
(NOT what is the acceptance rates of legacies – that’s a completely different number)</p>

<p>DD is flying home on Monday! Looking forward to having her home.</p>

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<p>Perhaps, but aiming at your own feet will hurt just the same with either strategy. </p>

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<p>Of course, it may be easy to define income taxes within the space on a postcard, but it is much harder to define income within the space on a postcard, even in the absence of typical deductions, exemptions, credits, and things like that.</p>

<p>PG – I guess my point isn’t about these specific influential alumni getting favors with admission, rather that they influence admission policy because they want it for themselves and their fellow alumni. I agree that individually they and the super high donors are an entirely different animal than the rank and file alumni. Clearly my Drew Faust daughter comment undermined that argument! Also, don’t believe you dont know who Steve Ballmer is. Your posts indicate you are very current events literate and this guy has been in the news twice a week for the past 10 years (very rough estimation – but pres of microsoft, buyer of the the Clippers from that weird racist guy…)</p>

<p>@Periwinkle‌, we’re discussing legacy preference, not development case preference. Two separate issues. Let’s focus on plain-vanilla alumni parents who make $100 donations, not $100 million donations. </p>

<p>Just because something (legacy preference) makes money for a noble cause like higher education, it doesn’t automatically make that practice ethical. The ends don’t justify the means.</p>

<p>Recall that during Apartheid a lot of schools divested their endowmnent holdings in South African stock. Right now there’s a separate Harvard lawsuit going on. A few days after the discrimination lawsuit, Harvard student sued the school to force it to divest $25 million of its endowment holdings in fossil fuels.
<a href=“http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/harvard-sued-push-fossil-fuels-divestment-27053944”>http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/harvard-sued-push-fossil-fuels-divestment-27053944&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Notre Dame supposedly is the biggest legacy school among the fancy colleges – about 25% of the class. Domers are a Kool Aid drinking cult rivaled only by the service academies.</p>

<p>Most other fancy schools, including the Ivies, are about half that. Still a big number.</p>

<p>Tradition and alumni giving are part of the puzzle on legacies. But it is primarily about getting a high acceptance yield from a pool that can full pay. And which also is pretty strong academically.</p>

<p>Princeton and Harvard have more money than God. But they also give out tons of financial aid. So both really depend on the 40% of their students who are full payors. A lot of those full payors are legacies. Princeton and Harvard also still turn down 70% of the legacies who apply. That is a terrible policy if the goal is alumni donations!!</p>

<p>The legacy programs at state schools UNC and UVA prove the point. Legacies who are in-state residents get no break for admissions. Even though in-staters would build tradition and also be future contributors as much or more than OOS folks. Legacy status only helps out-of-state applicants. Which happen to be the students who pay the much higher out-of-state price. UNC and UVA don’t want to sell the limited number of those higher priced seats to kids who will need a lot of financial aid. Tilting the OOS admissions in favor of legacies helps with that.</p>

<p>Most public universities tilt the OOS students toward those paying more by having higher OOS tuition and/or less OOS financial aid (whether or not they also have legacy preferences).</p>

<p>A 30 percent acceptance rate is extremely high when the student bodies’ overall percentage is less than 6 percent. </p>

<p>That means the acceptance rate for non legacies is closer to 3 percent. </p>

<p>---- maybe closer to 5 percent. Sorry.</p>

<p>Of course, the magnitude of legacy preference is not discernable from that, because the legacy applicant pool may be stronger. Since legacies of Harvard are from college graduate families, probably with high SES, and probably well nurtured and advised in K-12 with respect to college preparation (compared to first generation low SES students with no useful advising about college preparation from family, friends, and counselors), they likely are among the most advantaged applicants in terms of being able to present the top end qualifications needed to be competitive applicants. It would not be surprising if the legacies had a higher admit rate even if there were no legacy preference at all.</p>

<p>Whether it is desirable to give an additional preference to what is probably the pool of most advantaged applicants to begin with is another matter. Obviously, a lot of colleges have reasons to think that is desirable for some reason (encouraging donations, raising yield, reducing financial aid costs, etc.), even though many on the outside would disagree.</p>

<p>FYI, an interesting paper that argues that legacy preference at PUBLIC colleges is unconstitutional because it violates the Constitution’s prohibition on titles of nobility.
<a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/15/us/15bar.html?_r=0”>http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/15/us/15bar.html?_r=0&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

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<p>My kid checked no on the application form where it asked if she was a legacy, even though she was a legacy. Who wants to get in on that basis anyway?</p>

<p>“lot of those full payors are legacies. Princeton and Harvard also still turn down 70% of the legacies who apply. That is a terrible policy if the goal is alumni donations!!”</p>

<p>Exactly. If legacy were some kind of guaranteed bullet in, this would be a more meaningful discussion. When the majority are still rejected, it’s a different story </p>

<p>As plain-vanilla alums, we told our double legacy son that it was a feather on the scale and nothing more. Don’t set your expectations high and don’t count your chickens. </p>

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<p>At Brown, about 10% of the undergraduate student body is legacy. I imagine that legacy overlaps with athletic recruits.</p>

<p>Here’s a funny thing about legacy. The Brown Daily Herald has surveyed current students on this issue, and the vast majority say that legacy preference should be eliminated. But when I saw 5-year graduates at this year’s reunion with their newborn infants, many are wearing cute little T-shirts that say something like Brown Class of 2036 (handmade, even). It’s amazing how quickly your opinion changes when it’s your kid. </p>

<p>Consider that Asians are now between 20-30 percent (maybe higher?) of the student body at many selective schools, and have been for awhile now. I wonder what they’ll be thinking about legacy admissions when their kids are applying?</p>

<p>I’d be ok if they were eliminated. The year after my grandchildren get in. Yuk yuk.</p>

<p>I guess here’s the thing. It’s a lot easier to argue that un-academically qualified folks get in through the back doors of developmental admits and athletics and hence drag down the caliber of the student body and consequently the school’s reputation. It seems a lot harder to argue that plain-vanilla legacies are un-academically qualified. I’m not so sure that the numbers would change all that much if one’s legacy status was unknown. I certainly have seen no evidence that the legacy kids aren’t academically qualified and holding their own. I would anticipate they have high graduation rates as well, since they are from families who value academics.</p>

<p>And don’t we need to trot out the fact that Harvard’s acceptance of Yale and Princeton legacies is similar to their acceptance of Harvard legacies - which means that they are simply a function of educated, well-to-do, education-valuing families? I mean, we KNOW legacies don’t look like the majority of an applicant pool. </p>

<p>Thomas Espendshade was able to quantify the effect of admission preference for legacies using a series of logistic regression models:</p>

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<p>How much does Asian legacy count?</p>

<p>^^</p>

<p>It is good to remember what Espenshade did illustrate and what the basis was for his various studies. Simply stated it is a correlation between SAT scores and admissions. The limitations are that it condenses the entire holistic process into one imperfect standard. Fwiw, Espenshade himself has declared that none of his findings intimate cases of discrimination. The problem has never been with the analysis itself but with the faulty and reaching interpretations of people with specific agendas. The same could be said for most of the cited research in the Blum opus. A very narrow scope of data with a wide ranging and utterly faulty interpretation. </p>

<p>In a way, the issue with legacies is similar. We look at broad statistics and lump all of them together without weighing the 10-20 remaining attributes. Legacies come in all shapes and flavors. Some have very limited interactions with the school and others have helped their school for decades or centuries. The higher number of admissions should be surprising only if it were lower.</p>

<p>Can we blame the schools for taking a closer look at the applications of students who have been in the family for a long time AND will probably showing the same gratitude as their ancestors, and also KNOW how to contribute? The schools are not dumb … they know how to evaluate who is looking at a short stay to punch a ticket and who will get involved materially. The chances that legacies are the latter is higher and they have the history on their side. </p>