Last month, the Supreme Court made a great call of making affirmative action illegal. It is not only the ethical or logical issues with using overly broad racial categories that perpetuate racial tension. Affirmative action is an example of "too little, too late" in terms of education reform. I was glad to see this form of actual institutional racism disappear. This has led to pundits on the Left to bring up another practice in college admissions: legacy admissions.
Legacy admissions, or alternatively legacy preferences, is the practice of giving preference to an applicant based on their familial relation to the alumni of that postsecondary institution. The practice started in the 1920s as a way to keep White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASP) in universities because admissions departments were worried that Jews, Catholics, and Asians would dominate. What started off as a policy based in actual bigotry (as opposed to woke people calling everything they dislike "bigotry"), its rationale for being nearly ubiquitous in U.S. college admissions is financial. The rationale is that legacy admissions are way to position students to become better donors in the future. Political commentators on the Left have depicted this practice as "affirmative action for white people."
I would like to look at it from an economic lens, but let's start with the assertion that legacy admissions disproportionately benefit white applicants. One proxy that can help answer that question is figuring out what percentage of children's parents graduated from a university. This can at least provide a high-bound estimate of legacy admissions. According to U.S. Department of Education data (see below), Asian-Americans have the highest percentage (71 percent), followed by Caucasians (52 percent).
While Asian and white applicants are more likely to have a parent who graduated from college, that does not mean that the applicant will automatically choose to go to school where their parents attended. The argument about demographics gets tricky because, as a report from U.S. News points out, "legacy demographics can vary between schools" and "alumni connections may not be as closely associated with wealth or race at certain institutions." Unless you can prove that Harvard or other universities maintain legacy admissions to keep white students in or minority students out, the Supreme Court is going to be hard-pressed to remove legacy admissions.
Irrespective of racial demographics of legacy admissions, it begs the question of whether or not someone should get into a college primarily or solely because their parent attended that postsecondary institution. As mentioned earlier, the primary rationale for legacy admissions is financial. To quote one study, "legacies make better alumni after graduation and have wealthier parents who are materially positioned to be more generous donors than non-legacy parents (Castilla and Poskanzer, 2022)." Plus, legacy students are more likely to accept an offer, which means a more reliable revenue stream for college coffers.
That is the logic used. However, it is unclear as to whether or not removing legacy admissions would have an economic impact, as a poll of economists commissioned by the University of Chicago illustrates. As Yale economist Judith Chevalier indicates, "the elasticity of donations with respect to child admission is unknown." Plus, such elite universities as Johns Hopkins and MIT have recently eliminated legacy admissions without impact to their endowment funds.
Whether legacy admissions ultimately help with university finances does not get at if legacy admissions should be allowed. On the one hand, there is at least some level of discrimination. There are only so many applicants that get accepted because there are more applicants than there are seats. There is going to be discrimination in some form.
We as a society figured out that racial discrimination is morally wrong, which is why I do not view legacy admissions on the same level as affirmative action. We have the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VI of Civil Rights Act of 1964 to guide us towards a post-racial America, all of which makes affirmative action an anachronism at best and a form of institutional racism at worst. However legacy admissions got started, their main rationale in 2023 is financial in nature, not racial.
The existence of legacy admissions is not a reason to oppose the Supreme Court's ruling on affirmative action. After all, eliminating explicit racial discrimination is a step towards a post-racial America. However, if we are to live in a society that judges people by the content of their character, then it would stand to reason that legacy admissions need to go.
I could argue that private institutions should be exempt because of freedom of association. Conversely, private universities are major recipients of federal funding, particularly for research and development purposes (see federal database here). As long as that sort of funding exists, their funding should be contingent upon not using preferential treatment, whether affirmative action or legacy admissions. The same strings should be attached for the charitable-giving deduction tax break if it is given in response to a legacy admission. If the Supreme Court cannot rule against legacy preferences, then Congress should cut off funding for institutions that use legacy preferences.
After all, this country was founded on the ideal of meritocracy. We should fight for others to have the opportunity to succeed. We should not guarantee equal outcomes, but strive for an ideal in which one's outcome is primarily, if not completely, based on individual merit. That has been the American Dream: that someone from any background, whether native-born or foreign-born, can be awarded based on their hard work and achievement.
Those who have taken issue with meritocracy are having their version of "education" play out: increased indoctrination (as opposed to critical thinking skills), the erasure of logic and rational thinking, a lowering of the education standards, and a general dumbing down of the United States' students. I know that this ideal of meritocracy has not played out perfectly in practice and might never happen in full. Nevertheless, it is a noble ideal that has historically distinguished the United States from its European counterparts. Aiming towards an identity-blind meritocracy is the best we can hope for.
Admissions officers do not need to use legacy status as a proxy for academic performance when they can directly go to measures of academic performance and other merit-based metrics. Using broad and crude definitions of race do not measure the quality of an applicant, and neither does whether mommy or daddy attended that university. Much like with affirmative action, legacy admissions are antithetical to the values upon which this society was founded. Removing legacy preferences would bring this country a step closer to those ideals.
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