That’s quite a sweeping generalization. You’re trying to make legacy applicants into cartoon villains? Legacy admits are not exclusively ‘upper class’ (and what does that mean anyway?). Like everyone else, they are trying to do the best they can in the framework that exists - get a job/career that can sustain oneself and try to have a happy life. They are not 'erecting barriers in front of everyone else who has the potential to outcompete them"
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Shouldn’t they be playing by the same rules as everyone else? Shouldn’t everyone else be given the exact same opportunity to pursue a job and a happy life?
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Yes. But you can’t talk about the same rules for everyone and only single out one favored class.
I’m an agnostic when it comes to legacy admissions. Seems like a small price to pay for a sense of collegiality between alumni and also as a development tool. But all bets are off once the Supreme Court outlaws affirmative action. The optics will be awful.
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The first part of what you have written reminds me of Reeves’s Dream Hoarders book. He argues against legacy admissions for precisely this reason. He thinks that legacy admissions contribute to dream hoarding by the upper-middle-class, a trend that he believes has a negative impact on our society as a whole. He doesn’t think legacy admissions are new, but that dream hoarding in general has accelerated in recent decades. I don’t think that he extends the argument to the second part of what you’ve written though. It has been a long time since I read the book (and I admit that I mostly skimmed), but I don’t remember him going as far as to say that this hoarding will lead larger numbers of people to support communism or racism.
A little tangent. While it hasn’t been mentioned on this thread, the same day last week that the article came out about legacy admissions in the NYT, there was an opinion essay by Jay Caspian Kang exploring Warikoo’s new book Race at the Top: Asian Americans and Whites in Pursuit of the American Dream in Suburban Schools. Warikoo is the author of The Diversity Bargain.
I have not read her latest book, but reading Kang’s interview with Warikoo, it strikes me that this book also explores the ways in which dream hoarding has changed both college admissions and K-12 pedagogy. She seems to be arguing that it is suburban upper-middle-class white families that are driving the test optional movement in college admissions. Or at very least these families want standardized tests to remain less important in admissions while hanging on to the importance of sports and extracurricular activities (and presumably legacy preferences though it is not mentioned in this interview).
In any case, like Reeves, Warikoo seems to be arguing that suburban families are trying to do the best that they can for their children in the societal framework that exists. And maybe that is OK. The counter-argument, of course, is that pushing back against that framework might be better for American society as a whole even if it is not better for one’s individual family. Reeves seems to embrace this counter-argument; he is clearly criticizing the impulse to “dream hoard.” The interview with Warikoo did not go into enough depth for me to know whether she is criticizing the behavior of the families that she discusses or just documenting it.
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That sounds like an argument that if you cannot fix everything, you should not try to fix even one thing.
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I’ve read the book and recommend it highly. She does indeed argue that test-optional’s rise has been caused by white families who believe their children cannot compete with Asian children’s test scores, but unfortunately she doesn’t provide any actual evidence to support the claim. The book is on far firmer ground when it looks at white families leading efforts to limit homework and competition in school districts where there is a large or quickly growing Asian population (and almost always small or nonexistent numbers of Latino and Black children).
Anecdotally, now that test cancellations are no longer an issue, it seems like test-optional is no longer truly an option for unhooked students, so even if affluent whites were behind that push, it does not appear to have done them any good.
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I’m agnostic on the legacy factor as well.
Although we don’t have good data, I have heard many selective school AOs say that admitted legacies are often at or above the admitted student averages of objective measures such as GPA, rigor, and test scores. Of course, the same is true of a sizable portion of unadmitted applicants, be they legacies or not (and I sure wish schools would publish those stats because it would wake some people up, but that’s another thread).
If selective schools drop the legacy bump, it won’t come close to moving the needle on having a more equitable society, the numbers are just too small. That doesn’t mean that schools shouldn’t drop the legacy consideration. I assume many expect the same of private HSs too, right? The earlier the opportunities come in one’s life the better.
I hope that people whose sense of fairness, or ethics, or morality is offended by legacy consideration in college admissions are spending time advocating for change that can make a real difference in creating a more equitable society…in preschool, in K-12 education, in healthcare, etc. etc. etc.
For many of the types of students cited as being harmed in college admissions because of the legacy factor, they were disadvantaged (and for some the game was lost) far earlier than the point of college admissions.
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Agree completely. The Ivies are already very diverse and committed to full financial aid. The ones complaining that legacy is about “dream hoarding “ should look in the mirror
The education equity issues in our society can be better addressed by bolstering the teaching profession in all our schools
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But California is likely to remain test blind unless and until Asian parents start to exercise more political power (they were the driving force behind the SF school board recall and the return to merit-based admissions at Lowell HS). It’s still extraordinarily difficult to get an SAT or ACT test in the Bay Area, we had to drive to the Central Valley.
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In thinking about this, I have realized that I have another problem with legacy admissions.
Legacy admissions encourage kids to attend the same famous university that their parents attended. I do not see any reason to think that this is the place where they would fit the best.
I want my kids to justify their university admissions based on their own interests and their own accomplishments. I want my kids to find universities that are a good fit for them, not to attend the university that was a good fit for me or for my spouse.
Again, if it were up to me I would do away with legacy admissions. I would not expect this to significantly change which strong students get to attend some famous university. If it changes which particular famous university some particular strong student attends, this might be a good thing.
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As a wise bird once told me, need blind ≠ need ignorant. And vice versa. For every obvious/blatant bit of box-checking that can be removed from an application for the sake of appearances, there are scads of tells which remain and/or can be baked back in:
Bingo.
And I do think the optics here matter, but so do the dollars. The elites are in a never ending arms race to give more FA, to raise the income threshold which eliminates tuition entirely, to eliminate loans entirely, etc. That money has to come from somewhere.
Yup I think this is an important issue. The kids of FG/LI alumni aren’t all magically going to find themselves (way) up the ladder. It takes generations as you point out.
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Are only those “offended” responsible for creating an equitable society?
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How is that going to fix the legacy preferences in colleges?
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That hasn’t been our experience at all, if anything it was a turn off to the kids in our family because they all wanted to know that they got into their preferred school on their own merits.
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The eye roll doesn’t advance the conversation @Mwfan1921. I truly don’t understand your point. On first read, it sounds a little snitty to me, and I was hoping I was wrong.
I don’t have a history of being snitty on CC. My point was straightforward. Legacy impact at selective college admissions in the overall scheme of our country’s inequality problem is small, and inequality has to be addressed well before college admissions. I directly said that doesn’t mean a legacy preference or bump should continue.
But the reality is that removing legacy may not have any impact at all. Many seem to assume that a legacy admit would be replaced with a relatively less advantaged admit, and I don’t think that’s necessarily true. A non-legacy admit who replaces a legacy admit may look identical to the legacy in terms of grades, rigor, level of financial need, etc. Many highly selective legacy students are going to do well in selective college admissions regardless one of their parent’s schools admits them.
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Compared to the issues of lack of equitable K-12 education, legacy preferences at “elite” colleges are truly a minor issue.
Seriously, so what, 12% of the students at “elite” colleges are legacies. That is some 5,000 students a year. Based on the little we know, maybe 50% would not have been accepted had they not been legacies (based on the Harvard data, most legacies were also super wealthy, so likely they were also donors, or had the other advantages that the wealthy have).
So there are, perhaps, maybe, 2,500 of the 2,000,000 college-bound students every year who will not get into a college which they consider prestigious enough for them. Because, let’s face it, any kid who would get into one of those would be accepted to a top-notch college.
Now, let’s look at K-12 equitability.
Of the 3,000,000 or so high school graduates, around a million will not attend a college at all, mostly because they cannot afford to do so, or because their parents could not afford to provide them with a K-12 education that would prepare them for college.
Of the 2,000,000 college-bound students, 19% will drop out for good, mostly because of lack of funding. That is 380,000 students.
So,
- here on one side, we have over 1,000,000 students who do not attend college, and 380,000 student who drop out of college, because of financial issues, and because of failing K-12 systems.
- here on the other side, we have 2,500 student who could not attend a T-20, and instead were forced to attend a T-50 college.
So is legacy admissions at Elite Colleges an issue? Yes. Is it an issue which , if solved, will have a strong impact of the equitability of education in the USA? Not really.
I’m not even talking about the SES of the kids who are impacted by 1 versus 2.
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This is exactly why I asked for clarification and was surprised by your eye roll. Although your user profile is hidden, I’m sure if you check, I have liked a number, if not tens, of your posts.
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Likewise.
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