Many of the points that he is trying to make are correct but this feels really tone deaf.
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“A student from a privileged background can always call his uncle or his parents’ friends for advice or an internship. He doesn’t need the advantage of a highly selective college. But a first-generation Williams sophomore can call any Williams graduate and almost always get through, gaining through her hard work some of the advantages her privileged classmates simply inherited. She especially benefits from the sense of community.”
Maybe Williams is special, but … This is not what a first generation, socioeconomically challenged young man I mentored found when he attended a top LAC. He tried hard to get a summer internship that was equal to those his legacy/socially connected classmates were getting. He couldn’t get his foot in the door. This particular argument seems to be based on the author’s beliefs - I wonder if there is actually data that supports it.
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In terms of Williams, I find this to be quite true. My son is first gen there. Before he ever set foot on campus he had connected with an alum who had gone to our high school many (50+) years ago who then connected him with others in their network.
Regarding internships, I think a lot of it comes down to hustle. He has had paid summer internships both his first and second year doing the type of research he intends to pursue post-grad. He took advantage of connections with his profs and the resources on campus. His first year the internship was at Williams and this summer here was at Cornell.
I will say that Williams definitely is a special place.
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The professor’s penultimate comment seems relevant to a range of topical issues:
The Washington Post made a bad decision to publish this and compounded it by apparently not editing it for clarity and sense. Yikes.
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Yes, not a very well-written defense, to the point it may well do more to encourage the other side of the debate.
That said, I think it is actually pretty important to understand that point about legacy policies mostly just shifting the same group of applicants around within a couple broad “tiers” of highly selective colleges. That’s not really a pro in favor of those policies, but I agree if you are concerned about the rather disproportionate percentages of socioeconomic elites at the most selective US colleges, ending legacy policies is the proverbial rearranging of deck chairs on the Titanic.
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So, if legacy admission doesn’t exist there will no longer be a sense of community at a school? Alumni will no longer help current students? It seems an odd type of argument for retaining legacy preferences.
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So the argument is more that legacy admissions “contribute” to the sense of community, and specifically that multi-generational families, or families at least dreaming about becoming multi-generational, contribute extra to the sense of community, and legacy admissions are a factor in those multi-generational patterns/aspirations.
Of course none of that is actually verified, and even if there is some possibility of a sequence of causation like that in some cases, it could be a very minor factor in the overall process of community building.
So the claim is stated weakly enough it is hard to entirely dismiss, but also so weakly it is hard to credit it as necessarily important.
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The professor seems to believe there are only 2 sets of students - privileged and poor.
In his mind, anyone earning $200k could be deemed privileged despite the fact almost no one making that money could afford to send their kids to any of these schools where the cost of tuition/room and board would be about 70% of their take home pay (after factoring in FICA taxes and depending on state income tax).
There’s wide range of students who are neither attending Phillips Academy or low income first generation.
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As with most any issue, I think the legacy admissions topic is both more nuanced than most treat it, and also needs some case-by-case analysis instead of broad brushes. Schools could clear up a lot of the controversy if they were clear/honest about what they do, too. But it’s also worth noting that we’re talking about a really small slice of the pie here, almost entirely confined to highly selective private institutions.
Some of the debate could be refined if we just distinguished between two separate types of legacy admissions, because it’s sort of a barbell situation. On the one end of the barbell, you have the “do we give a leg up when compared to similarly qualified applicants if your parent is a standard issue alum” situation. And on the other hand, you have “bending our admissions review process to accommodate the children/grandchildren of big time donors or development targets.” The extreme example of that second group is the Kushner-style pay for a new building on campus to get my kid into Harvard type of situation.
For the first group, the supposed advantages from family-like community, and multigenerational loyalty and school spirit (and, it should be mentioned, better yield), have to be weighed against the benefits that could be gained by expanding the school’s reach to new people and demographics. If a school can articulate why they feel the balance leans toward the former (whether it’s got any way to verify or quantify whether it’s an accurate belief or not), that puts them in a better position to justify having some legacy admit program. I think that’s what this Williams prof is, rather poorly, attempting to do.
From what I’ve seen firsthand as well as heard from fellow parents, though, for most alums at most universities and colleges, legacy is already dead. It consists of a separate pile for applications and a promise that they’ll get read, even if the same application would be put directly in the rejection pile after a review of topline numbers without the alum connection. But for the most part most holistic reviews have evolved to where a lot of other factors get more weight than this sort of soft “family ties to the school” characteristic. I don’t believe Williams or anywhere else is accepting many children of non-Development Office VIP alumni who are marginal admits or rejects without that hook anymore.
For the second group, institutional goals like bulking up the endowment or upgrading residential buildings has to be weighed against the detriment from lowering admissions standards to a degree usually only seen for athletes. That’s a totally separate analysis, I think. But my sense is most institutions believe the benefit to the academic community from a million dollar gift vastly outweighs lowering the average SAT score of the incoming class by 0.1, or foregoing the opportunity to accept one more deserving kid who will get rejected instead but still get a chance somewhere else. The interesting question going forward will be whether that calculus changes at schools with $15B+ endowments that could fund capital improvements and free tuition for half the school in perpetuity.
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Although I’m not a big fan of legacy admissions, I think a well reasoned argument can be made as to their value - this wasn’t it.
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Agreed, this article had a few tidbits within it but it mostly just a hot mess.
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This argument always gets on my nerves. One of my really good friends at boarding school was a third generation legacy—his "intergenerational community"ness boiled down to a funny story about the senior prank his mom’s class pulled. In fact, when I sent him this article, he specifically singled out this paragraph as “disgusting.”
Incidentally, he was also a fourth generation legacy at a certain liberal arts college, with so many alumni relatives that he got to pick and choose which ones to list on his application. He ended up going elsewhere.
What do we find in the opposing corner? Symbolism. Marketing. Propaganda. Public relations posturing. (Only those with a fondness for clichés would call it virtue signaling.) The message to high school students: Welcome to the elite! No one by birth has a better chance than you! To the public: We might charge $65,000 a year, but we are for the proletariat! (Yes, only old college grads say “proletariat,” but you know what I mean.) To alumni: See how good your old school is! By the way, click on this link to donate.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/08/21/legacy-admissions-colleges-diversity/?
This guy’s been to a few too many Wesleyan homecoming games.
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On this note, I’ll add that Williams students overwhelmingly come from well-off families despite the college’s generous financial aid.
A report a few years back found that roughly as many Williams students were from the top 1% as from the bottom 60% (18.1% and 19.6%, respectively). A large majority (67%) were from the top 20%.
I guess the point is that legacy admissions is one factor in creating a intergenerational community or network that at least in the case of Williams ultimately helps first gen students get jobs, i.e. the well worn path of Williams alums that go into finance, consulting, law, etc. has been built over generations. That community has helped many first gen students break into the professions. It’s an interesting point and an example of viewpoint diversity which should be considered.
Missing from his essay is that one of the forms of Legacy admission with the greatest weight is children of current faculty.
If you think we’re anxious here about where our kids go, imagine being this guy (Amherst alum & faculty at Williams) explaining to his kids that “well actually these T20 schools are a crapshoot lottery now for almost everyone, and really you should be looking hard at UMass.”
If he has a magic bullet to get his kids and possibly his grandkids into Williams (US News Rank: #1, 9% admit rate), he’s going to fight to keep it and come up with any justification necessary.
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In other words, he did not do what the article suggested: Just call some Williams alumn from the Williams directory, and magically there will be an opening that business didn’t have before.
What you are describing sounds more like how students do (should) approach this at every single college?
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This one has come up before on this thread. The author doesn’t need any justification and though there may be some chatter around this one I doubt that it is going anywhere. C (Children of employee) preferences are likely more limited in scope and less impactful than people think (if you have data I’d be interesting in seeing it). They are also an employment benefit that could be taken away but is also subject to bargaining and negotiation. You might see some additional transparency around this but it has too much value as a recruiting and retention tool to be completely eliminated.
Maybe it is just me, but I have no problem with that one. My dad worked for an automotive company, and they gave him a company car and special pricing on additional cars. Probably was very efficient compensation for a car company. And this feels like the same thing to me.