For every student accepted to Harvard, nineteen others are rejected, making admissions a zero-sum game in which a set of criteria promoting a particular group will directly demote others. One such evaluation factor is legacy admissions: the practice of granting an admissions advantage to relatives of college alumni. A common defense for legacy admissions is that schools can recognize alumni and encourage alumni donations without compromising merit, by merely breaking ties among equally qualified students. However, existing research demonstrates that legacy policy itself does not create more generous alumni donors, and unfairly privileges weak legacy applicants—those who would not get into comparable peer institutions—over minorities and low-income students who are underrepresented among legacy admits. Thus, the preference for alumni children sacrifices socioeconomic and racial diversity for a negligible change in donations, highlighting the need for credible re-examination of the historically inequitable and factually unfounded legacy admissions.
On the Record
In regards to legacy, the Harvard admissions website states, “The application process is the same for all candidates. Among a group of similarly distinguished applicants, the daughters and sons of Harvard College alumni/ae may receive an additional look.” Daniel Golden, who won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in Beat Reporting partly for his research on Harvard admissions, reveals that the “additional look” carries more weight than what it sounds like: “he [Dean Fitzsimmons] personally reads all applications from alumni children.” Given this information, Fitzsimmons’ view on legacy policy—alumni provide time, money, and publicity for the school, making Harvard “a happier place”—is essentially a justification for the additional attention to alumni children. The Harvard Admissions office and Dean Fitzsimmons declined when asked to speak on legacy admissions. The Harvard Office of Gift Planning could not be reached for comment.
Tensions between Harvard’s current student body and many Americans’ ideal student body demographics are evident from the ongoing affirmative action lawsuit . However, scrutinizing admissions practices is not to say that Harvard students who have been admitted under certain policies are inferior to those who did not benefit from them. Admission into Harvard is not a measure of self-worth-rather, it is a process that strives to create incoming classes that best align with the university mission, but is far from perfectly objective and fair. Julie Chung ‘20, a first generation low-income student who signed the national #FullDisclosure letter asking for more legacy admissions transparency, told the HPR, “We all belong here… To say that we deserve this institution over millions of other people is a harder sell.” She emphasized that all students who get into Harvard should be welcomed, but no one technically “deserves” to be here.
Therefore, investigating admissions practices serves not to question particular Harvard students’ rights to be here or to alienate them, but instead to attempt to address the imperfections of admissions policies. Chung added, “We sometimes skirt around topics of admissions fairness because we’re afraid it’ll hamper the sense of belonging of students that the College so diligently tries to cultivate. But we should be unafraid to tackle such topics head-on without those fears, especially once we separate admissions fairness from notions of belonging.”
Legacy and Money
Although admissions offices and conventional wisdom might suggest that legacy admissions create more generous donors, there exists little evidence supporting the link. In a 2010 study using data from the top one hundred universities, Chad Coffman et al. found “no statistically significant evidence of a causal relationship between legacy preference policies and total alumni giving among top universities” among schools with similar institution sizes, public/private status, and alumni wealth. Because legacy policies do not preference large donations over smaller ones, there is no incentive for legacy admits to donate more than non-legacy admits.
However, the same study shows that schools with legacy admissions enjoy higher alumni giving if wealth is not controlled for. Legacy and non-legacy families donate the same proportion of their wealth, but because legacy families tend to be wealthier, they tend to donate more in absolute terms. In this sense, a wealthy legacy student donates just as much as an equally wealthy non-legacy student. Coffman et al. concludes, “The preference policy effectively allows elite schools… to discriminate based on socioeconomic status by accepting their own wealthy alumni families rather than basing admissions on merit alone.” The special quality in alumni children that Fitzsimmons cites as leading to increased donations is wealth, not generosity.
Does abolishing legacy preferences hurt colleges? Most likely not, as showny by Coffman et al.’s examination of schools that dropped legacy admissions between 1998-2008 that found “no short-term measurable reduction in alumni giving as a result of abolishing legacy preferences.” Even though admissions offices tend to claim that legacy graduates donate more than non-legacy graduates, admissions data over generations show that an institution could thrive even without legacy admissions. Yale, which has decreased the legacy proportion of their students from 31.4% to 8.7% since 1939, exemplifies that reduced legacy admissions does not impact alumni donations in the longer-run. Although the institution faced significant alumni backlash in the 1960’s when it sought to decrease alumni preferences while increasing race and gender diversity, Yale has seen an increase alumni donations over the past five decades. Meanwhile, the current legacy admissions rate has dropped well below the previously rejected legacy admission rates.
Richard Kahlenberg, senior fellow at The Century Foundation and editor of Affirmative Action for the Rich, spoke with the HPR on the futility of using legacy admissions as a fundraising tool: “If there’s a sense that we should be able to bribe families into giving money by dangling the chances of increased admission, why not open it up to everyone? You could say to the wealthiest individuals in the world….you could have an auction and that would be a more efficient way of raising money.”
Legacy and Equity
Proponents of legacy admissions defend the fairness of legacy by claiming it only serves as a “tip” towards admissions for already-qualified students. However, existing research indicate that legacy admissions grants a disproportionate advantage to legacy admits whose application would have been too weak by itself to grant them admission.. A letter to the editor of The Times from a former Princeton admissions officer corroborates this reality, stating that “5 to 10 percent of the admitted students were legacies who would not otherwise have been admitted.”
Michael Hurwitz, Senior Director at College Board and member of the National Bureau of Economic Research, reviewed the impact of legacy admissions on admissions at 30 selective colleges and found that legacy students were around three times as likely to be admitted as non-legacy students with similar academic backgrounds, even at SAT (Math + Critical Reading) scores of 1250-1290, the lower end of cores at selective colleges. Although these academically weaker legacy students enjoy a 200-400% admissions advantage at their legacy institutions, Hurwitz observes that they are less likely to get into other colleges than their peers with similar applications. “A student with a 1300 SAT score and legacy at [a school] would be less likely to gain admission to a school [where he is not a legacy] than would a student with a 1300 SAT score, but no legacy connection at the sampled schools.“ This suggests that legacy students with low SAT scores—in the context of highly selective colleges—have weaker applications than non-legacy students with low SAT scores. Hurwitzthen notes that the consistent admissions advantage of legacy students, irrespective of their academic backgrounds, “strongly contradicts the widely held notion that legacy status [merely] serves as a tip factor.”
Consider an example with two fictitious students, Bob and Charles, who both have SAT score 1300 and are applying to Harvard and Yale. Bob has legacy status at Harvard and is therefore 3.27 times more likely to get into Harvard than Charles, who does not have any legacy status. According to Hurwitz’s work, Bob is however less likely than Charles to get into a comparable institution like Yale, which suggests that Bob and Charles are not comparable applicants. Bob’s legacy advantage is clearly more than just a “tip” for comparable applicants—it gives an edge to a weaker applicant over a stronger one.
Looking Ahead
For some students, the advantage of legacy admissions outweighs any concerns with its equity. The secretary of Penn First, a first-generation students group at the University of Pennsylvania, noted the value of legacy policies for the social mobility of students themselves: “Why would I have gone through all of this and made the step to change the position of my family within the socioeconomic ladder if my kids won’t get to benefit from this someday.” Sam Korsky (‘19), a student at MIT, told the HPR that he would want his children to have legacy and that private colleges “should be able to do whatever they want.”
For others, the arbitrary advantage given by legacy admissions is a failure of equity. Chung told the HPR, “I refuse to perpetuate an obvious flaw in our admissions system that itself perpetuates cycles of concentrated wealth in this country.” And although the MIT admissions office did not comment for this article, its blog lambastes legacy admissions for it “not only takes away a spot from an equal or better student, [but] specifically…from an equal or better student who overcame more by not having the advantages accrued by prior generations.”
However, both sides would likely agree that it is nearly impossible to judge legacy admissions without more research and public statistics on the admissions process. College admissions offices have defended their admissions processes by making or believing false claims about legacy admissions that have been disproved by academic publications. Although “fair” and “optimal” admissions are subjective notions, the assumption that a group of privileged students is “more generous” and “comparable” to less-advantaged students can and should be tested with data. How can admissions offices themselves and the public evaluate admissions practices if we are all—willingly or unwillingly—blind to the facts?
Image Source: Wikimedia Commons/ Daderot