Not exactly the most persuasive Op Ed I’ve read … on any topic.
I found this to be especially fuzzy at the margin:
This sense of community benefits everyone, most especially those who are not from privileged backgrounds. Consider one of the chief advantages of attending a highly selective liberal arts college: the network. 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. Many factors contribute to this, and legacy admissions might be only one, but this intergenerational loyalty and inheritance of social capital are real, and what is real should count.
You’re still going to have the network, with or without legacy admissions, as long as the school includes some threshold level of kids from privileged backgrounds, which by definition it will as long as the school remains selective. The network may not be as purely Williams as legacy admissions would produce, but I don’t see that as watering down the FG kid’s access to a network. That kid graduated from Williams and can call on other Williams grads, or the relatives of those people. Would it be slightly more robust if all the relatives were, too, Williams grads? I guess. Is it compelling? Not to me.
The question of legacy admissions is admittedly minor, affecting extraordinarily few people.
Michael Roth said the same thing, so why all the fuss in this thread, and in the WP, and elsewhere, to salvage it? If it’s no big deal, and it appears to confer an unearned advantage, why are we talking about it so much?
If the legacy student took the place of a first-generation student, I would light the torches myself. But that’s not the way it works. At least at the colleges I am talking about, no legacy is admitted at the expense of a first-generation student; they are admitted at the expense of other privileged students who have other excellent options.
It’s funny to see this rationale. The supporters of affirmative action often invoke it as well. But in the world of holistic admissions, which I generally support, there is a bottom line, and that is the size limit of the admitted class. When one person gets in because they have something other people don’t have, the people who don’t have that thing have one less spot available to them. They are competing for a scarce resource, so everyone who has a ticket that puts them further ahead in the line by definition has an advantage. That’s true of athletes, AA admits, legacy and anything else that serves as an additional qualification.
I was excited to read the piece and was waiting for the “ah ha” moment, where my views would be enhanced by an argument I hadn’t considered. That didn’t happen.