And yet…
Oxford is pretty much regarded as the world’s top university. We can start another thread to discuss that. Lack of alumni donations isn’t changing Oxford’s global reputation.
The central premise of the article is weak overall, imo.
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Exactly. Indeed, sometimes we are talking about estate bequests.
The idea is if your grandparent went to College, and then so did your parent, and then so did you, and you hit it big, maybe you give College a big gift.
So decades before, they admitted you as a legacy not because your parent gave big. That would be a donor’s list case.
They admitted you as a legacy back then because they were hoping eventually you would give big.
Or least one of them.
But Oxford and Cambridge are, of course, insulated from the same competitive pressures as the top US colleges. Like, they take up something like the same share of the UK system as all the Ivy+ and and a few top LACs do in the US system. And you can’t even apply to both of them!
Can you imagine how much easier Harvard, say, would have it if you couldn’t apply to any other Ivy+ or top LAC at the same time? Not even Yale!
This is a real challenge with drawing comparisons to other countries’ post-secondary systems. The US system is truly unique, and nothing else is even close.
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I have a rather jaded view of legacy admissions. As in, we know that you’re the right kind of person, the kind of person we built our brand on. It allows the school to perpetuate that brand in the right circles.
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And then people want to go to these colleges because they place well in the sorts of white shoe businesses that have white shoe clients. But they complain about how they keep admitting kids from white shoe families.
It is really all of a piece.
Is that a good thing? This premise of this article is based on the concept of American exceptionalism.
There are sooooooo many other institutions in the world conducting amazing research. There are countries with exceptional higher education and better living standards (almost anywhere in Scandinavia comes to mind) and young people don’t need to go bankrupt to access it.
There are a million good things about the US, but legacy admissions isn’t one of them. Imo, the article is representative of the tunnel vision that many Americans have about this country and higher education here.
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People object to legacy admissions because a small number of schools have a stranglehold on certain jobs. It’s not about sour grapes over not being a “white shoe family.” People who object to legacy admissions would like a fair playing field for these schools AND would like these schools to stop having a stranglehold on certain jobs. It is not good for our country that almost the entire Supreme Court comes through a small slice of the Ivy League. So for those people who are against legacy preferences, the threat of Harvard losing some of its power is no threat at all.
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That is a very difficult question.
It is observable no other country has the same incredible diversity of options in its post-secondary system. By most measures of value-added outcomes, the US system also does extremely well across most of the system, the notable exception being for-profit colleges.
But could it be even better if we had a more global-standard system? It is virtually impossible to answer a question like that. Indeed, for that even to be possible, we’d also need to overhaul our entire K-12 system, maybe even earlier ages than that.
So I truly do not know the answer to questions like that. But I do know US colleges do not have the power to unilaterally change the entire US education system. They need to compete within it as it is.
As an aside, stranglehold is a bit of an exaggeration. Grads of Ivy+ colleges are disproportionately represented in various top outcomes, even controlling for family SES, but they are not exclusively represented in those outcomes.
But sure, maybe some people want to end even that discrepancy.
However, I also encounter a lot of people who de facto want that placement advantage for their kid when they are graduating from college, they just don’t want their kid to be at a disadvantage when graduating from HS.
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Approx. 30% of Harvard’s admits are legacies, so a bit more than “a few slots.”
If as you say this is a long game about someone 3-4 generations from now hitting it big, why would that be any different than any of the admits eventually hitting it big? Is there evidence that a fourth generation legacy is more likely to hit it big than a first gen alum?
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For a college admission consultant focusing on highly selective private colleges, legacy preferences probably make it more profitable for them. Legacy applicants likely have more family money and willingness to use it for this purpose, and probably have higher likelihood of success and predictability, so they are easier and more profitable customers than unhooked strivers seeking admission in the pure merit portion.
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So there seems to be some confusion about this number. During the study period, approximately 14% of Harvard admits were legacies as Harvard defined them for special admissions purposes. A slightly higher percentage are matriculants because legacies yield at higher rates, but I believe that was a little over 16%. The larger numbers seem to be coming from surveys indicating an additional percentage have some other familial tie to Harvard, but not one that Harvard credited for special admissions purposes.
And then some of those legacies had high numbers themselves. Harvard in fact has claimed legacies have a higher median test score than other admitted students. The experts in the lawsuit nonetheless agreed high number legacies were admitted at higher rates than their other attributes could explain, although there was some dispute about exactly how much higher.
But the specific scenario I gave of a lower ACT legacy getting admitted over a higher ACT non-legacy was not necessarily common. It was more like if you looked at the pool of people with 34 ACTs, 34 ACT legacies were being admitted at a higher rate than 34 ACT non-legacies. At the margins, this is going to result in some cases like what I described, but not necessarily a lot.
That said, yes, I was channeling the sometimes almost dismissive attitude Harvard and the like took toward the credentials of legacies versus non-legacies.
I don’t know. But I believe the argument is more that the fourth-generation legacy who hits it big is more likely to give big to the family college. To be clear, though, the claim seemed to be any generation was more likely to give big.
So, if generations 2 and 3 were still alive when generation 4 was admitted, then any of generations 2, 3, or 4 could potentially be more likely to give a big gift at some point after the admission of 4.