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<p>The new legal attacks are interesting.</p>
<p>wow...it is up to the colleges...cuz if that's banned, what's next? Affirmative Action?</p>
<p>These theories are "interesting" and "novel" but I wouldn't advise anybody to spend their own money pursuing such a lawsuit. I suppose it's remotely possible that it might be found improper for public institutions to consider legacy status, but private institutions? I don't think so.</p>
<p>Wow. Public institutions certainly shouldn't have that sort of criteria, but with private it's up to them I suppose.</p>
<p>The argument seems pretty sound to me. I would not be surprised to see legacy preferences disappear in a few years.</p>
<p>There hardly is any such thing as a "public university" anymore except in name. Most of the major ones get a small minority of their funding from the state and private funding is now approaching or even more than the public share. They need the small carrot of lagacy admits as much as privates.</p>
<p>People have been attacking AA for decades. It's about time legacy status underwent the same scrutiny. I also have this rollicking theory that all athletic scholarships be banned -- and that idea came from a professional athlete I happen to know. But that's for another day ...</p>
<p>The nobility clause, that is novel. The Constitution was intended to limit the powers of Government, not the conduct of private individuals or institutions. The nobility clause restricts the Government from setting up hereditary offices, leaving The People to do what they want.</p>
<p>It would be difficult from the standpoint of original intent to argue that the nobility clause can be used against private organizations, when 23 signers of the Constitution were members of the Society of the Cincinnati, whose membership is inheritable, following the rules of primogeniture.</p>
<p>Society</a> of the Cincinnati - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia</p>
<p>^ many of the constitution's signatories owned slaves too. Oh how their infallible greatness inspires me!</p>
<p>...For the naysayers, how come British schools - Oxford among them - are able to look past legacy in their admissions process?</p>
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many of the constitution's signatories owned slaves too.
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<p>The thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments were designed to fix that problem.</p>
<p>Those amendments came nearly a 100 years later and were not the efforts of the constitution's original signatories. According to a supreme court revisiting in the 1990s, the Japanese internment camps of World War II are still considered constitutional. Excuse me for not being impressed by arguments from authority when the authority figure's merits are not as great as everyone makes them out to be. Not to mention that the opportunity for error in interpreting a near 200-year old historical figure's opinions is immeasurably vast.</p>
<p>Well said, JW Muller. The intent of the framers was to prevent America from becoming a very socially hierarchical society with respect to government, like many of the European countries, such as England were (and for the most part, still are today). Legacy admissions at any college, private or public, hardly contributes to this.</p>
<p>Brendanww -- of course the Constitution had mistakes; the Founding Fathers weren't infallible. They were men, not angels...ok sorry, my point is that the anti-nobility stance very much made sense at the time, and still does. However, that doesn't change the fact that it isn't all that applicable to college admissions.</p>
<p>If certain colleges and preparatory schools are allowed to discriminate admission based on gender, I highly doubt that anything barring legacy considerations could be sustained.</p>
<p>If this reasoning can, in fact, be applied to private universities, then presumably it would also apply to private K-12 schools, who would then no longer be permitted to give sibling applicants a preference.</p>
<p>Our local public schools give a transfer preference to siblings of students who have transferred into schools in another residential zone. Presumably those would be banned, as well.</p>
<p>Everybody can relax. This is just another cockamamie theory in a law review article. The likelihood of any court ever accepting it is virtually nil.</p>
<p>"We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, national origin, color, sex, age, veteran status, or
disability. It is our intention that all qualified applications be given equal opportunity and that selection
decisions are based on job-related factors."</p>
<p>This basically says HEY YOU CAN"T DISCRIMINATE BASED ON RACE, yet every university still does. If it is legal for affirmative action to exist when decades old law practically explicitly says it can not, then vague nobility clauses surely aren't enough to ban legacy preference.</p>
<p>And one could argue that preference for "first generation", URM's, students from under-represented states, etc. etc. would also be illegal. A bad idea.</p>
<p>The legacy preference can worsen discrimination because the racial/ethnic mix of legacies reflects that of the college a generation or two ago -- not that of today's applicant pool.</p>
<p>For example, I think it could reasonably be argued that the legacy preference discriminates against Asian-American applicants because many of their parents didn't live in the United States when they were college age and didn't attend U.S. universities.</p>
<p>Another quote from the Inside Higher Ed article:
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But legal challenges have been few. In the 1980s, the U.S. Education Department considered complaints that legacy admissions systems discriminated against Asian American applicants, but ruled that this was not the case because, as more Asian Americans became graduates of elite colleges, their children would benefit much as the children of white alumni have benefited over time.
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<p>Such nonsense is a by-product of a litigious society and tolerated by self-serving cowardly politicians. This is one of the reasons that three colleges in the country do not use federal funds to pay the administration or apply to financial aid. As a result their costs are comparable to the COA of flagship publics in the northeast and west. </p>
<p>Two of them, Grove City and Hillsdale, do it without comprimising on the quality of teaching. Not sure about the third, Principia, but perhaps there too depending upon your personal values.</p>