It might be a minor issue, but it is EXTREMELY EASY to fix. Unlike the equitable K-12 education. And, it is hard to believe, I know, but both CAN be solved in parallel.
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Getting rid of legacy admissions at public universities is easy - the state legislature just has to make that decision. For private schools, itâs not so easy.
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What makes it ânot easyâ? Is it as hard as making K-12 equitable? 
IMO it is as easy as the âprivate schoolsâ deciding to go test optional.
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While your anecdotal experience may be difference, if that was commonly the case there wouldnât be such a material percentage of legacy students in these colleges. Maybe it bugs some of them but not enough to turn down the school.
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Because it is not up to anybody but the universities to do so, and there are such things as legal challenges, etc. For K-12, all that we have to do is have politicians who actually care about providing kids with high quality education. Sad fact: most politicians do not care about kids at all.
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I see. So if it is up to the universities, that makes it hard? What legal challenges? Somebody is entitled to have his kids have legacy preferences?
Yeah, it is so easy to fix K-12⊠All we have to do is to live in a perfect world and have politicians that care. There are not going to be legal challenges for the steps making K-12 more equitable?
As I already mentioned, we all can walk and chew gum at the same time. There is no need to say âyes, but XYZ is importantâ.
Arguments for legacy admissions generally are based on the following:
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Donations. Alumni donations make these alums feel self-important, but theyâre typically only a small fraction of the overall donations to an elite school. It isnât uncommon these days for some alums whose children were denied admission to stop giving, as if the donations were quid pro quo.
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Affinity. Elite college graduates tend to have a natural affinity for their colleges anyway, whether their children choose to attend the same colleges or not. Should their children be more excited to attend their parentsâ colleges because of some preferential treatment they received rather than their own merits? At least some of them wouldnât be as @momofboiler1 has described.
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Qualification. Legacy admits may be on average as qualified as non-legacy admits, but the average doesnât really tell the story. Distribution of legacy admits tend to be more barbelled than that of non-legacy admits. Some legacy admits are very highly qualified while some others are underqualified compared to their non-legacy counterparts. Colleges wouldnât need to offer legacy preference if there were no beneficiaries, would they?
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Iâll ask you - is somebody entitled to have their kid accepted to Harvard because they (the parents) have enough money to pay for tutors, ECs, and a top-notch private school, from which Harvard accepts kids with a 3.5 GPA? Yet here we are.
Your analysis basically boils down to the fact that there arenât really that many legacies, so they donât displace that many âworthierâ candidates in the grand scheme of things. And yet the exact same point (with similar numbers) can be made about URMs, but the Supreme Court thinks AA is a big enough deal that they are going to take it on and likely rule against it.
Good for your kids!!
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I agree I admire kids who are determined to get in on their own merits, but in my experience it is rare. We have family friends whose kids are double legacies at Stanford but were determined to get into college on their own merits. After getting shut out at every single Ivy, but accepted to Stanford (even the one who applied test optional) they changed their tune pretty quick. I personally know about a dozen Stanford grads, but only 2 who were not LADC.
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And those people will sue Harvard? You are joking, right?
This is too many assumptions to make without supporting data.
Itâs my sense (and I donât have data, just from conversations with enrollment management professionals and counselors) that the number of academically underqualified admitted legacies who arenât also hooked in another way (athletic, development, URM) is very small. If we are talking sub 20% colleges not sure that could be more than a few hundred students in toto each year. Those legacies who are also recruited athletes will just be replaced by another recruited athlete (so not opening up an opportunity for someone less advantaged).
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SCOTUS rules at AA violated the constitution because it was based on race. Officially, legacy does not discriminate between kids of alumni based on their race, ethnicity, or sex. The problem in declaring the legacy discriminates in favor of some racial groups as opposed to others can be made for every factor that is considered by every admissions office in the USA.
The point is that private colleges can fight back against these changes, and they are.
PS. To clarify - I did my undergrad outside of the USA, and my kid was not a legacy to any college. While I do not support legacy, I think that its importance is overblown, and I think that, in many cases it is a red herring. The point is to flip out one type of advantage of the wealthy in favor of another.
The only thing that removing legacy may do is to replace one set of wealthy kids with another set of wealthy kids. Places like Berkeley got rid of legacy and AA and they still have more kids from the top quintile than from the other four quintiles together.
Caltech is even worse. It does not have legacy and it does have AA, and yet it belongs to the list of colleges which has more students from the top 1% than it does from the bottom 20%, not to mention having 69% from the top 20% by income. MIT is only slightly better.
So removing legacy admissions seems to do very little in increasing the percent of low income students. All that it seems to do is to allow wealthy privileged kids who benefit from all other advantages of wealth except legacy a better chance at admissions.
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This issue of legacy reminds me of a discussion I had a few years ago where I was talking with a couple whose child was in the midst of the college admission process at one of the most competitive public high schools in the country (Bay Area). This couple was white, affluent and highly-educated (wife was Yale undergraduate) Based on our conversation I am sure they shared many of the same ideologies that @1NJparent and @ucbalumnus have espoused: against legacy admission, for affirmative action, etc.
The wife feared her child had not distinguished herself enough in HS to gain admission to an elite college. The husband, who was not educated in the US, disparaged the whole college admissions process, and at the same time, signaled his overall displeasure about the priorities in the US where the underprivileged/underrepresented are treated so unfairly (in perpetuity).
Upon hearing this, I asked if he would be willing to give up his childâs spot at an elite college so that an underprivileged/underrepresented person could benefit and he unequivocally answered yes. The wife was silent on this issue.
As my wife and I left this conversation, we were taken by how virtuous these people were and yet I wondered how their child felt about their fatherâs willingness to give up an opportunity at an Ivy league college in the name of social justice. It is something that I would never do. In my role as a parent, I have always felt my role was to maximize opportunities for my children and I have never had a problem with that (nor shirked from the responsibility).
Several months later, we were surprised to learn their kid was accepted to Yale and planned on going. It is unclear if she was accepted EA or RD, however we are pretty sure it was not the only place the kid appliedâŠI am so glad this kid doesnât listen to her dad.
It strikes me if people think legacy admissions are wrong, they are welcome not to participate or accept any wrongful offers of admissions. That being said, while many people claim to think legacy admission is wrong/unfair, few actually turn down these opportunities when offered.
For those of us who did not have this advantage before, but have it now, why not use it? To take away legacy admissions after it has been available (for decades) to the wealthy, white and privileged seems to be like moving the goal posts when someone new is about the start winning.
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So, you canât explain who will sue these universities if they remove the legacy preferences. You couldâve just said that, no need for long explanations.
The number of students who attend elite colleges is very small compared to the overall college student population, and those who are affected by legacy admissions are, of course, even smaller in number. But why should the size matter? We donât differentiate if a corrupt practice (say, insider trading) has only a few or many victims.
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Letâs say a small school like Caltech decides only to admit students who qualify for USAMO or equivalent in other subjects, and makes that clear in advance (ie equivalent to what happens in the UK where Cambridge make you take an especially challenging math test). My expectation is that those qualifiers will come disproportionately from the top 1%. But is that âeven worseâ than other admission systems, let alone discriminatory? Or is it simply an indictment of most high schools in the US, not identifying the most able students and offering them pathways to progress?
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I donât disagree. My point is eliminating legacy preference isnât going to make any difference in terms of addressing inequity (which I think is the primary argument against the practice, correct?), as mwolfâs post detailed above.
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Caltech, according to its president, does NOT offer preferential treatment to any group based on race or ethnicity. Iâm not sure the rest of your statistics are any more correct.
I know this for certain: students who attend Caltech or MIT, the two schools that donât offer legacy preferences, are generally from much less wealthy families than their counterparts at Stanford, Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, which offer legacy admissions.
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